Abstract

Recommendations and critiques concerning methodological safeguards in ESP experiments are currently widely scattered throughout the literature, with little indication from the community of experimenters or critics of how important particular safeguards are, or how they should be implemented and reported. This paper reports the results of a questionnaire survey of the parapsychological research community\'s views concerning the importance of various methodological safeguards in ESP experiments. An extensive literature survey of recommendations for safeguards against error, information leakage, and participant fraud in ESP experiments was carried out, and a questionnaire based on this literature survey was mailed to 94 researchers who had published an ESP experiment, and/or commentary criticizing ESP research methodology in the previous 10 yrs, in order to determine their opinion on which safeguard procedures are necessary to conduct and report in ESP studies. Results show! a high level of consensus between the respondent groups about the importance they attach to various safeguards.