The experimenter effect should not be any surprise to parapsychologists. If any psi study is successful it is because a correspondence has been found between participants’ responses and the targets they aimed at. But what are the targets? From the point of view of the participant they are not at all available. They are what they are because of the intentions of the experimenter.
I am speaking here from the point of view of my first sight theory, which holds that a psi target is never consciously perceived or consciously acted upon. It is something we only engage unconsciously — as in fact (from this perspective) we engage virtually everything all the time! Which of these countless engagements result in expressions in behavior or action that allude to the target is determined by the unconscious intentions of the participant in the context of his or her conscious and unconscious appraisal of what is of primary concern in the moment. Part of this contextual appraisal has to do with the intentions of other important people in the situation.
We can say that the meaning of psi targets to the participant in an experiment is simply their meaning to the experimenter, the experimenter’s intention that these targets will be accessed by the participants. The experiment is a social situation of interweaving intentions. Probably most often, the participant intends to comply with the intention of the experimenter and succeed at the task. For most experimenters who want to learn about psi and to avoid the pain of feeling their work is futile, their intention is that the participants succeed. But what about the case where the intentions of the experimenter are negative, or partly negative? What if the experimenter wishes, at least in part, for failure? Then the nature of the targets is changed. The targets become negatives of themselves, at least in part. To succeed will then be to fail to comply with the explicit task in order to fulfill the secret one. If the targets are only partly negated by mixed intentions on the experimenter’s part, participants must respond to this mixture, and surely give a desultory performance.
We may object to this characterization because we know the targets exist independently of the experimenter or anyone else, and we assume that it is these autonomous objects that the participants make reference to in their responses. But why should we assume that? The targets are not available to the participant.
If the participant were carrying out a study alone, aiming to respond to some unknown thing (the well-being of a distant person, the location of a lost item) then only the participant’s intentions define the concerns in the situation. Only those intentions will channel the expression of psi. In an interpersonal context other intentions become involved and contribute to the outcome. Most things, most often, have an important interpersonal context
We all know what it is like to participate in interpersonal situations with their mixtures of intentions. The intentions of the most dominant people will be most salient generally, and if one wishes to please them or defy them one’s behavior will be guided accordingly. “Learn this algebraic rule,” says a beloved and impressive teacher, and the students tend to quickly learn. If a weak or disliked teacher says the same thing, or if a normally decent teacher lacks any heart for it that day, the students will learn less well because their attention will drift to competing concerns willy nilly, following their own independent intentions. The group loses cohesion, each student becomes an individual guided by private concerns, there is little group product.
In such ordinary learning, the dominant instructor sets the tone, the emotional, meaningful context, for the learning task. This tone conditions all the learning. This is not because the dominant instructor makes them learn. It is because the students take the dominant person’s intentions as an important cue about what matters in the situation, and choose (unconsciously) to respond accordingly. In a parapsychological experiment, the experimenter (and any other dominant figure in the situation) sets the tone, creates the context in which the intentions of the participants take shape. The target that is to be apprehended in an ESP task, or produced in a PK task, is essentially an intention of the experimenter, positive, negative or mixed.
Some experimenters seem to get from their participants a much higher rate of successful results than others do. Their characteristic intentions must be a major factor at work. The most successful experimenters I know seem to be quite persistent in wanting good results and cheerful and optimistic about expecting them. Their participants tend to feel that they are being invited to go along on a zany and interesting ride. The less successful experimenters often convey moods of doubt, ambivalence, cynicism or pessimism, whether about parapsychology or other matters of importance to themselves. So, let us tend to our unconscious intentions! They do not create our results unaided, but they contextualize them.