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Agape Experiment: Testing Group Telepathy (statistical study in progress) Dr Bernard Auriol (EuroPA meeting, November 2003) A Group Experiment H1 : The rate of hits is increased by redundancy due to vote. H0 : The rate of hits is not increased by vote. Protocol A transmitting group (1-16 senders) and a receiving group (1-16 voters) were located in two isolate rooms. Everything was monitored and recorded by computers. Target’s type : either pictures (2) or words (3 or 5) Participants : any voluntary (either sheep or goat) sender or receiver role generally chosen by the participants 274 female (2/3) 145 male (1/3) 240 telepathic ESP group sessions: 27,845 collective trials (250,000 individual trials) Results Targets 2 images 3 words 5 words Expected Mean 0.500 Individuals Vote Obs. m. Obs. m. 0.499 0.498 n=27,081 n= 2,940 0.333 0.333 0.329 n=102,634 n=10,696 0.200 0.201 0.202 n=120,347 n=14,219 Variance of success got by vote (30 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 intervals To reach a better evaluation, we note the interval ( number of misses) between two consecutive hits, and check the variance of these intervals (random or not ?). Variance of the intervals Targets Success Obs. Var. Exp. Var. 2 1463 1.93* 2.00 3 3512 6.42* 6.00 5 _ 777 20.05 20.00 * ==> p < 0.05 Conclusion of the hypothesis test This type of group experiment did not increase the psi-hitting rate regarding either individual answers or answers obtained by vote. No improvement of the Signal to Noise ratio (S/N) (redundancy got from majority vote is not effective). Variance was significantly weak with two targets. But strong for three targets and normal for five. Are these variations explainable by socio-psychological attitudes ? Prospective Covariance Analysis of success cases Collective trials significantly different from chance (p <0.05) Nb. of tries Percent of tries Higher than chance 1,079 3.87 Lower than chance _ 413 1.48 Equal to chance 26,353 94.64 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 Estimate Qualitative variables Instruction given to transmitters Shortened time left to answering Targets’ list chosen Variable Higher than chance Lower than chance + 0.10 … + 0.30 - 0.12 - 0.34 + 0.26 Mark Estimate Success given to RecGr Receivers -1,54 TransGr Senders +0,58 Distance from chance Sybil (Systematic bilocality) 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.