Yup. The paper notes that initially they got a statistically significant effect in women, but nothing in men. They were using a standard library of erotic images intended to be used in scientific experiements. They then started using modern hardcore internet pornography instead of the standard scientific library of pornography and the results were then comparable.
In our first retroactive experiment (Experiments 5, described below), women showed psi
effects to highly arousing stimuli but men did not. Because this appeared to have arisen from
men’s lower arousal to such stimuli, we introduced different erotic and negative pictures for men
and women in subsequent studies, including this one, using stronger and more explicit images
from Internet sites for the men. We also provided two additional sets of erotic pictures so that
men could choose the option of seeing male–male erotic images and women could choose the
option of seeing female–female erotic images.
That isn’t exactly methodologically reassuring. If you keep fiddling with the parameters you’ll eventually get an outlier result even if the effect is nonexistent.
Very interesting. I’ve thought for a long time that the boringness of the Rhine cards might influence the results.
If the experiment is tracking a real effect, it should be stronger with the subjects’ preferred sort of erotic pictures.
Yup. The paper notes that initially they got a statistically significant effect in women, but nothing in men. They were using a standard library of erotic images intended to be used in scientific experiements. They then started using modern hardcore internet pornography instead of the standard scientific library of pornography and the results were then comparable.
That isn’t exactly methodologically reassuring. If you keep fiddling with the parameters you’ll eventually get an outlier result even if the effect is nonexistent.