Examining Psychokinesis: The Interaction of Human Intention with Random Number Generators, A Meta-Analysis

Holger Bosch, Fiona Steinkamp and Emil Boller's Examining Psychokinesis, The Interaction of Human Intention with Random Number Generators, A Meta-Analysis, published in Psychological Bulletin in 2006, is a peer reviewed statistical meta-analysis combining 380 studies testing whether human intention correlates with the output of random number generators. The authors found a very small but statistically significant overall effect, then used modeling to argue that the effect's size, its relationship to each study's sample size, and the wide variation between studies were all consistent with publication bias rather than a genuine psychokinetic effect, concluding psychokinesis was not proven. Its strength is a rigorous, large scale statistical treatment published in a leading mainstream psychology journal. Its limit is that its publication bias explanation is itself disputed: parapsychology researchers published direct methodological responses in the same journal arguing the bias correction was applied incorrectly, so the meta-analysis's conclusion should be read as one position within an active statistical argument, not a closed case.