Bem's 2011 paper passed normal peer review at a mainstream, high-prestige psychology journal, which is what made its aftermath so consequential. Independent researchers immediately tried to reproduce the results. Stuart Ritchie, Richard Wiseman, and Christopher French ran three pre-registered, direct replications of one of Bem's nine experiments, "retroactive facilitation of recall," and found no effect in any of the three; when they submitted the null results to the journal that had published Bem's original paper, it was rejected without external review, a decision that drew its own criticism. Other laboratories attempting related replications reported similarly null results.
Statisticians identified specific methodological weaknesses in the original study, including flexible stopping rules and multiple comparisons, that could produce apparently significant results without any real effect. Because Bem's paper had cleared ordinary peer review at a top journal using then-standard practices, its failure to replicate became a central exhibit in psychology's broader replication crisis, prompting journals and researchers across the field, not just parapsychology, to adopt pre-registration and stricter statistical standards. Precognition research continues in small pockets of parapsychology, but no version of Bem's effect has been confirmed by a result the wider field accepts as independent and reliable.