SHEEPS AND GOATS by Mick
Some 50 years ago, parapsychologist Professor Gertrude Schmeidler ran a series of Extra-Sensory Perception experiments which have become famous as the “Goats and Sheep” experiments.
Basically she found that subjects who simply acknowledged the possibility that ESP exists (the Sheep), tended to score higher than average in standard card-guessing routines, but those subjects who pooh-poohed ESP as “baloney” (the Goats), tended to score below average.
Those results (since replicated by scientists many times over the years since) are fascinating at face value, BUT there’s an even more fascinating aspect to it, namely that the Goats score BELOW average.
See? - The laws of chance would dictate that their scores should simply be around average, but they’re below average, thereby suggesting the Goats are “digging themselves into a hole” of disbelief!
No wonder Prof Schmeidler says -“This was inexplicable by the physical laws we knew, it implied unexplored processes in the universe, an exciting new field for research. From then on, naturally, my primary research interest was parapsychology”
parapsych.org/members/g_schmeidler.html
Er…any psychologists here care to have a shot at explaining the phenomenon?