Abstract

While there has been a large and quickly growing literature in what might be called the PK side of health and healing research, namely remote influence on biological systems, there has been relatively little research on the ESP side. The latter has come to be labeled as intuitive diagnosis or intuitive assessment. The most rigorous research on this topic was done in the 1970s testing graduates of psychic development courses, but the results were uniformly nonsignificant. In the present experiment, eight volunteer "intuitives ", who reported frequent psi experiences but (with one exception) no intuitive assessment experience, were asked to diagnose eight volunteer target persons (TPs), each of whom has or had one or two distinctive and relatively serious medical conditions. The intuitives and TPs were divided into two groups of four each, with an effort made to minimize overlap of symptoms within each group. The readings were conducted at the home of the experimenter supervising the sessions (C.R.), who was blind to TP identities. No one else was present. Each intuitive gave successive readings to the four TPs in their group, in counterbalanced order using a Latin Square design. To help the intuitives focus on each particular TP, they were presented with a photograph of a security envelope containing the TP's name. The session began with a structured interview of the intuitive concerning his or her attitude toward the study and any abilities, practices, or training he or she might have that would be relevant to the assessment task. The intuitives then completed Aron's Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) scale. Immediately following the diagnosis, the structured interview continued, with the intuitives being asked how they conducted their assessments, their experience during the session, and their estimation of success. The entire session was tape recorded, and the tapes were transcribed by a person not otherwise involved in the study. The TPs served as judges, either at their homes or at the Rhine Research Center. Each did four successive judgings, one for each intuitive in their group. They ranked the four readings given by the intuitive in the order of correspondence to their symptoms and then rated them on a 0-100 scale. This task was done separately for the total reading and for physical symptoms only (minus sex, age, temperament, and psychological problems.) The rankings and z scores of the ratings were averaged across TPs to get scores for each intuitive. Although it appeared that the judges rated each reading independently, the target designations formed a closed deck. In recognition of this factor, a Monte Carlo type analysis was performed on the general assessment ranks. Results were close to chance on all measures, and the experienced intuitive obtained one of the poorer set of scores. There was no withinsession order effect or significant variability of success across TPs. The HSP scores were uniformly high and they correlate negatively but nonsignificantly with assessment scores. The interview data have yet to be analyzed.