Agape Experiment:Further Statistical

Studies(in progress)

Dr Bernard Auriol

(EuroPA meeting, November 2003)

ProtocolAgape Experiment lasted seven years to test H1 :

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

Nb of tries Success P-value

2 pictures 27,081 49.94% 0.83

3 words 102,634 33.34% 0.95

5 words 120,347 20.13% 0.27

Majority VoteMajority Vote

Possible Targets

Expected Mean

Observed Mean

2 images 0.500 0.498

3 words 0.333 0.329

5 words 0.200 0.202

Targets Nb Salvos Obs.Var. Exp.Var.

2 196 3.08* 3.75

3 713 3.37 3.33

5 268 2.39 2.40

Variance of success got Variance of success got by voteby vote

(15 trials per salvo)

Targets Nb Salvos Obs.Var. Exp.Var.

2 98 5.26* 7.50

3 356 6.32 6.67

5 134 4.72 4.80

Variance of success got Variance of success got by voteby vote

(30 trials per salvo)

Targets Nb Salvos Obs.Var. Exp.Var.

2 49 11.92* 15.00

3 178 12.39 13.33

5 67 _9.03 _9.60

Variance of success got Variance of success got by voteby vote

(60 trials per salvo)

Variance of intervalsVariance 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 Variance of the intervalsintervals

Targets Success Obs. Var. Exp. Var.

2 1463 1.93* _2.00

3 3512 6.42* _6.00

5 _777 20.05 20.00

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 Majority Strength and

Success of VoteSuccess of VoteIf 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

ConclusionConclusionof 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 tria l issignificantly 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 po = expected percent of successes; = observed percent of successes

~Khi2 (one df)

Collective trials Collective trials significantly significantly differentdifferent from chance (p <0.05)from chance (p <0.05)

Nb. of tries Percent of tries

Higher than chance __1079 _3.87

Lower than chance ___413 _1.48

Equal to chance 26.353 94.64

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 0.0001

Collective trials significantly departing from chance

Estimate Higher than chance Lower than

chance Constant + 1.06 - 1.12

Instruction given to transmitters

+ 0.10 …

Targets’ list chosen - 0.34 + 0.26 Relevant reward - 0.13 …

The time left once half the receivers answered equals the time already

spent

+ 0.27 - 0.02

(…) twice the time already spent

+ 0.30 - 0.12

Qualitative Variables

Collective trials significantly departing from chance

Estimate Higher than chance Lower than chance

Constant + 1.06 - 1.12 Time to answer - 0.01 + 0.01

Ratio nb. of transmitters / nb. of participants

- 1.46 …

Ratio nb. of transmitters / nb. of receivers

+ 0.96 …

Quantitative Variables

Effect of the relationship Effect of the relationship between participantsbetween participants

Variable Mark given to

Estimate Success Distance from chance

P-value

RecGr Receivers -1,54 < 0.0001 TransGr Senders +0,58 __0.0003

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 answeras an aggression coming from the transmitters’ sub-group.

Couldn’t that be the need for each individualto 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.