Definition
Plain language
A psychologist whose study claiming people can sense the future was written in ordinary scientific style and never replicated.
As stated in the literature
Daryl Bem's 2011 precognition experiments; methodologically conventional presentation with p-values and controls, widely cited as a replication-crisis exemplar.
Why it matters: It demonstrates that a claim can follow every conventional rule of scientific presentation and still be wrong, which is exactly the case surface-level checks miss.
For example, participants were asked to guess which of two curtains hid an image before the computer had chosen where to put it, and the paper reported they guessed right slightly more often than chance.
Heard on the show
“Bem, who writes like a mainstream academic psychologist with p-values and control conditions, draws seven.”Episode 240 — Frontier Models Designed Follow-Ups To Fraudulent Papers 93% Of The Time