Agape Experiment: Further Statistical Studies (in progress) Dr Bernard Auriol (EuroPA meeting, November 2003)

Protocol Agape Experiment lasted seven years to test H 1 : The rate of hits could be increased by redundancy due to vote. To test it, there were a transmitting group (emission-strength of 1 to 16 senders) and a receiving group (1 to 16 voters), located in two separate isolate rooms. Everything was monitored and recorded thanks to several computers and a network especially designed for the experiment. Three main protocols were tested with Two pictures, Three words, or Five words as possible target. Moreover, different parameters varied from one session to another in order to find the best conditions for later replications.

240 telepathic ESP group sessions, 27,845 collective trials 250,000 individual trials ! Participants : any voluntary either sheep or goat sender or receiver role generally chosen by the participants 274 female (2/3) 145 male (1/3) target’s type : either pictures or words possible answers’ number => 2, 3 or 5

Individual Answers

Majority Vote

Variance of success got by vote Variance of success got by vote ( 15 trials per salvo)

Variance of success got by vote Variance of success got by vote ( 30 trials per salvo)

Variance of success got by vote Variance of success got by vote ( 60 trials per salvo)

Variance of intervals To reach a better evaluation, we note the interval (  number of misses) between two consecutive hits, and check the variance of these intervals (at random or not ?).

Variance of the intervals

Instable Attitudes of Receivers ? That apparently inconsistent set of variances shifting according to the protocol could be linked to an alternation along the sessions of Goal-Oriented Socio-psychological Attitudes producing in turn Psi-Nothing, Psi-Hitting and Psi-Missing.

Majority Strength and Success of Vote If some answers are not due to chance but to ESP, this should have an impact on the majority: Strong majorities could be more linked to success than weak ones. Unlike what we expected, strong majorities didn’t get better results than weak ones

Conclusion Conclusion of the hypothesis test The results did not fulfil our hope regarding a possible improvement of the Signal to Noise ratio (S/N) (redundancy got from majority vote). This way of carrying out the experiment, did not strongly increase the Psi-Hitting rate as we expected, but seems to have made the results random, regarding either individual answers or answers obtained by vote.

Prospective purpose: Covariance Analysis

Nevertheless, for heuristic purpose, we undertook a covariance analysis on collective trials which are significantly different from chance (p < 0.05) In order to test the effect of each variables modality, we used a transformation of the « percentage of hits » to be able to compare the results for the protocols with two pictures, three or five words. where:- is the percentage of right answers in the trial p is the expected percentage

We can test if the percentage of hits got for each trial is significantly lower than chance, significantly higher than chance, or equal to chance, thanks to a test of Khi2. The statistic of this test, calculated for each trial, is with p o = expected percent of successes; = observed percent of successes ~Khi2 (one df)

Collective trials significantly different from chance (p <0.05)

We focused on the trials where the percentage of hits differed significantly from chance expectation. The effect of different parameters on the answers kept was outlined with a covariance analysis. The significant variables were selected thanks to a stepwise procedure and kept under a threshold of 5%. We get significant parameters with a p-value close to

Collective trials significantly departing from chance Qualitative Variables

Collective trials significantly departing from chance Quantitative Variables

Effect of the relationship between participants Familiarity between Receivers moves the results closer to chance. Familiarity between Senders and Receivers moves the results away from chance. For the trials significantly higher than chance expectation, adjusted R² equals 10.8% (« small » effect according to Cohen’s convention)

Conclusion If there was any Psi manifestation in our experiment, there would be a strong tendency to reject the right answer as an aggression coming from the transmitters’ sub-group. Couldn’t that be the need for each individual to avoid his own dissolution, especially if the individual belongs to a group, (situation which favours the fusion among the members) ? Is Psi-Missing a cross-boarder defense system ?

Sybil We plan to devise a protocol to test the following hypothesis: We can hope for success with groups only if we build sub-groups so that there is more affinity between receivers and senders than among receivers. A simple sociometric test should be enough to achieve this, provided the results for each sessions help to distribute the roles of transmitter and receiver.