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COPYRIGHT 2001 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
Studies with mediums by Gary Schwartz and colleagues have been widely reported in the media as scientific proof of life after death. But their experiments did not employ blind judging, used an inappropriate control group, and had insufficient safeguards against sensory leakage.
Schwartz, Russek, Nelson, and Barentsen (2001) recently reported two studies in which mediums appeared to be able to produce accurate information about the deceased under conditions that the authors believed "eliminate the factors of fraud, error, and statistical coincidence." Their studies were widely reported in the media as scientific proof of life after death (e.g., Matthews 2001; Chapman 2001). This paper describes some of the methodological problems associated with the Schwartz et al. studies and outlines how these problems can be overcome in future research.
Schwartz et al.'s first experiment was funded and filmed by a major U.S. television network (Home Box Office--HBO) making a documentary about the survival of bodily death. The study involved two participants (referred to as "sitters") and five well-known mediums. The first sitter was a forty-six-year-old woman who had experienced the death of over six people in the last ten years. Schwartz et al. stated that this sitter was recommended to them by a well-known researcher in ADCs (After Death Communication) who "knew of the sitter's case through her research involving spontaneous ADCs." The second sitter was a fifty-four-year-old woman who had also experienced the death of at least six people in the last ten years.
During the experiment, the sitter and medium sat on either side of a large opaque screen. The medium was allowed to "conduct the reading in his or her own way, with the restriction that they could ask only questions requiring a yes or no answer." Each sitter was asked to listen to the reading and respond to the medium's questions by saying the word "yes" or "no" out loud. The first sitter was given a reading by all five mediums; the second sitter received readings from only two of the mediums.
A few months after the experiment, both sitters were asked to assign a number between -3 (definitely an error) to +3 (definitely correct) to each of the statements made by the mediums. The sitters placed 83 percent and 77 percent of the statements into the +3 category. Schwartz et al. also reported their attempt to discover whether "intelligent and motivated persons" could guess the type of information presented by the mediums by chance alone. The investigators selected seventy statements from the readings given to the first sitter and turned them into questions. For example, if the medium had said "your father loved dancing," the question became "Who loved to dance?" Sixty-eight undergraduates were shown these questions, along...
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