Daryl Bem - WikiHQ

Daryl J. Bem (born June 10, 1938) is a social psychologist and professor emeritus at Cornell University. He is the originator of the self-perception theory of attitude formation and change. He has also researched psi phenomena, group decision making, handwriting analysis, sexual orientation, and personality theory and assessment.

Early life and education

Bem received a BA in physics from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, in 1960 and began graduate work in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The civil rights movement had just begun, and he became so intrigued with the changing attitudes toward desegregation in the American South that he decided to switch fields and pursue a career as a social psychologist specializing in attitudes and public opinion. He obtained his PhD in social psychology from the University of Michigan in 1964. becoming a professor emeritus.

Bem testified before a subcommittee of the United States Senate on the psychological effects of police interrogation and served as an expert witness in court cases involving sex discrimination. which proposes a different mechanism of change than that of Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory. The two theories appear contradictory. Dissonance theory explains how people change their attitudes when they find themselves acting in opposition to the attitudes they already hold, while self-perception theory explains how people create their attitudes in the first place.

According to self-perception theory, people infer their attitudes from their own behavior much as an outside observer might.

Exotic becomes erotic theory

Bem's exotic becomes erotic theory (EBE) presents one possible explanation as to what differentiates the etiology of homosexuality from heterosexuality. Bem theorized that the influence of biological factors on sexual orientation may be mediated by experiences in childhood, that the child's temperament predisposes the child to prefer certain activities over others. Bem noted that because of their temperament, which is influenced by biological variables such as genetic factors, some children will be attracted to activities that are commonly enjoyed by other children of the same gender, while others will prefer activities that are typical of the other gender. Bem theorized that this makes a gender-conforming child feel different from opposite-gender children, while gender-nonconforming children will feel different from children of their own gender. He believes that this feeling of difference evokes physiological arousal when the child is near members of the gender which the child considers as being "different". Bem theorizes that this physiological arousal is later transformed into sexual arousal: that is, as adults, people become sexually attracted to the gender which they came to see as different, or "exotic", while they were children.

Bem based this theory in part on the finding that a majority of gay men and lesbians report being gender-nonconforming during their childhood years. A meta-analysis of 48 studies showed childhood gender nonconformity to be the strongest predictor of a homosexual orientation for both men and women. Bem also noted that in a study by the Kinsey Institute of approximately 1000 gay men and lesbians (and a control group of 500 heterosexual men and women), 63% of both gay men and lesbians reported that they did not like activities typical of their sex in childhood, compared with only 10–15% of heterosexual men and women. Bem also drew from six prospective studies, longitudinal studies that began with gender-nonconforming boys around age 7 and followed them into adolescence and adulthood; a majority (63%) of the gender nonconforming boys become gay or bisexual as adults.

Two criticisms of Bem's theory in the journal Psychological Review concluded that "studies cited by Bem and additional research show that Exotic Becomes Erotic theory is not supported by scientific evidence." Bem was criticized for relying on a non-random sample of gay men from the 1970s (rather than collecting new data) and for drawing conclusions that appear to contradict the original data. An "examination of the original data showed virtually all respondents were familiar with children of both sexes", and that only 9% of gay men said that "none or only a few" of their friends were male, and most gay men (74%) reported having "an especially close friend of the same sex" during grade school.

Neuroscientist Simon LeVay has said that while the theory was arranged in a "believable temporal order", that it ultimately "lacks empirical support".

Bem and Charles Honorton (1994) reviewed the experimental arrangements of the autoganzfeld experiments, and concluded they provided excellent security against deception by subjects and sensory cues. Bem and Honorton's review was criticized by the scientific community as it contained errors. Julie Milton and Richard Wiseman (1999) who discovered errors in Bem's research carried out a meta-analysis of ganzfeld experiments in other laboratories. They found no psi effect, the results showed no effect greater than chance from a database of 30 experiments and a non-significant Stouffer Z of 0.70. The article's findings challenged modern scientific conceptions about the unidirectional nature of time. Its presentation by a respected researcher, and its publication by an upper-tier journal, engendered much controversy. In addition to criticism of the paper itself, the paper's publication prompted a wider debate on the validity of peer review process for allowing such a paper to be published. Bem appeared on MSNBC and The Colbert Report to discuss the experiment. American author and researcher Mitch Horowitz has noted that Bem's experiments in precognition and retrocausality, which have been validated in a meta-analysis of 90 trials in 33 labs in 14 nations, comport not only with relativity but also with interpretations of quantum physics.

Wagenmakers et al. criticized Bem's statistical methodology, saying that he incorrectly provides one-sided p-value when he should have used a two-sided p-value. This could account for the marginally-significant results of his experiment. Bem and two statisticians subsequently published a rebuttal to this critique in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Jeffrey Rouder and Richard Morey, who applied a meta-analytical Bayes factor to Bem's data, concluded, "We remain unconvinced of the viability of ESP. There is no plausible mechanism for it, and it seems contradicted by well-substantiated theories in both physics and biology. Against this background, a change in odds of 40 is negligible.

After evaluating Bem's nine experiments, psychologist James Alcock said that he found metaphorical "dirty test tubes," or serious methodological flaws, such as changing the procedures partway through the experiments and combining results of tests with different chances of significance. It is unknown how many tests were actually performed, nor is there an explanation of how it was determined that participants had "settled down" after seeing erotic images. Alcock concludes that "Just about everything that could be done wrong in an experiment occurred here". Bem's response to Alcock's critique appeared online at the Skeptical Inquirer website, and Alcock replied to these comments in a third article at the same website.

One of the nine experiments in Bem's study ("Retroactive Facilitation of Recall") was repeated by scientists Stuart J. Ritchie, Chris French, and Richard Wiseman. Their attempt to replicate was published in PLoS ONE and found no evidence of precognition. Several failed attempts by the authors to publish their replication attempt highlighted difficulties in publishing replications, attracting media attention over concerns of publication bias. The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Science Brevia and Psychological Science each rejected the paper on the grounds that it was a replication. Wiseman set up a register to keep track of other replicating efforts to avoid problems with publication bias, and planned to conduct a meta-analysis on registered replication efforts.

In 2012, two independent articles found that the number of rejections of the null hypothesis reported by Bem (nine out of ten tested) is abnormally high, given the properties of the experiments and reported effect sizes (Francis, 2012; Schimmack, 2012). Schimmack (2015) used a more powerful test to reveal selection for significance, the Test of Insufficient Variance, and found even stronger evidence that the reported studies are biased in favor of supporting ESP. These findings imply that studies with non-significant results are missing and the reported evidence overstates the strength of the effect and evidence. According to Francis, this suggests that Bem's experiments cannot be taken as a proper scientific study, as critical data is likely unavailable.

The publication of Bem's article and the resulting controversy prompted a wide-ranging commentary by Etienne LeBel and Kurt Peters. Using Bem's article as a case study, they discussed deficiencies in the accepted methodology most commonly used in experimental psychology. LeBel and Peters suggest that experimental psychology is systemically biased toward interpretations of data that favor the researcher's theory.

In 2012, the same journal that published Bem's original experiments, The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 103, No. 6), published "Correcting the Past: Failures to Replicate Psi" by Jeff Galak of Carnegie Mellon University, Robyn A. LeBoeuf of the University of Florida, Leif D. Nelson of the University of California at Berkeley, and Joseph P. Simmons of the University of Pennsylvania. The paper reported seven experiments testing for precognition that "found no evidence supporting its existence."

In a 2017 follow-up article in Slate magazine on the "Feeling the Future" experiments, Bem is quoted as saying, "I'm all for rigor, but I prefer other people do it. I see its importance—it's fun for some people—but I don't have the patience for it." The article continues: "It's been hard for him, he said, to move into a field where the data count for so much. "If you looked at all my past experiments, they were always rhetorical devices. I gathered data to show how my point would be made. I used data as a point of persuasion, and I never really worried about, 'Will this replicate or will this not?'"" While fellow psychologist Stuart Vyse sees this statement as coming "remarkably close to an outright admission of p-hacking", he also notes that Bem "has been given substantial credit for stimulating the movement to tighten the standards for research" such as that taking place in open science.

A large-scale pre-registered replication in 2023, which included Bem and other ESP proponents in its design, found no evidence for precognition.

Family life

Bem married Sandra Bem (née Lipsitz), also a psychology professor, in 1965. Though still legally married, they were "amicably separated" from 1994 until her death in 2014. In 2015, he married his partner of twenty years, Ithaca College professor of communication studies, performance studies, and queer studies Bruce Henderson. They live in Ithaca, NY.

Selected publications

Bem, D. J. (1972). Self-Perception Theory. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 6, pp. 1–62). New York: Academic Press,
Bem, D. J. (1970). Beliefs, Attitudes, and Human Affairs - Wadsworth Pub Co,
R. L. Atkinson, R. C. Atkinson, E. E. Smith, D. J. Bem. Introduction to Psychology 1990 - Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Bem, D. J. An experimental analysis of self-persuasion. Attitude change: the competing views, 1971
A. Caspi, G. H. Elder, D. J. Bem. Moving against the world: Life-course patterns of explosive children. Developmental Psychology, 1987
A. Caspi, G. H. Elder, D. J. Bem. Moving away from the world: Life-course patterns of shy children. Developmental Psychology, 1988
D. J. Bem, C. Honorton. Does psi exist? Replicable evidence for an anomalous process of information transfer. Psychological Bulletin, 1994
D. J. Bem, H. K. McConnell. Testing the self-perception explanation of dissonance phenomena: On the salience of premanipulation attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1970
S. L. Bem, D. J. Bem Does Sex-biased Job Advertising" Aid and Abet" Sex Discrimination? Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1973

References

External links

Official Page, Site of Cornell University
Publications online at Personal Home Page
[https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2014/12/30/the-test-of-insufficient-variance-tiva-a-new-tool-for-the-detection-of-questionable-research-practices/]