The evidence for the most compelling psi phenomena

In 2018, Professor Etzel Cardeña, PhD, who holds the Thorsen Chair in Psychology, including parapsychology and hypnosis, at Lund University, published a landmark review paper surveying thousands of psi studies in "American Psychologist," one of psychology’s most respected journals.

In this conversation with Hans Busstra, Cardeña explains his main findings and why a dismissal of psi without looking at the data is “as unscientific as you can get.” Cardeña’s conclusion is that the cumulative evidence for psi phenomena is so strong that outright dismissal is no longer scientifically justified.

Although the effect sizes reported in many psi experiments are small—for instance, in controlled laboratory settings, participants in precognition studies predict randomly selected images only slightly above chance—the statistical significance across large bodies of research is nonetheless striking.

In other words, if one applies the same standards of scientific rigor used elsewhere in psychology, it’s scientifically unjustifiable to dismiss psi phenomena simply because they challenge prevailing materialist assumptions or because their effects are small.