Vegetarians and Meat Eaters: Testing Relative Performance in a Precognitive Ganzfeld Remote Viewing Task
Michael J. Daw, Chris Roe, & Callum E. Cooper
University of Northampton, Northampton, United Kingdom
Introduction: We present an analysis of an experiment to test the relative performance between vegetarians and meat eaters at a precognitive ganzfeld remote viewing task. A number of spiritual traditions include accounts of supernormal powers that are sometimes associated with vegetarianism; for example, yogis who are strict vegetarians are said to exhibit powers such as mind-reading; and several authors have related vegetarianism to both spirituality and psi. At the SSE-PA conference in 2021, we presented an analysis of interviews with psi adepts who use vegetarianism and fasting to enhance sensitivity to psi. At last year’s SSE-PA conference, we presented an analysis of surveys that showed self-reported psi experiences to be positively associated with vegetarianism, fasting, and other dietary practices among selected samples. This paper builds on these studies to explore whether such findings might persist in a test of psi under controlled laboratory conditions.
Methods: The ganzfeld remote viewing protocol employed in this study involved inducing in the participant a mild altered state of consciousness by minimizing stimulation through dispersed red lighting and relaxing sound, during which the participant provides information through creative open-ended response related to a future ‘target’ about which it is not possible to ascertain any information through normal sensory means. Meta-analytic results for protocols such as this reach high levels of significance and mean effect sizes of up to .15 for ganzfeld and .39 for remote viewing.
Following recent similar studies, we adopted a precognitive design involving one participant per trial because this simplifies recruitment, avoids the potential for collusion between participants, and allows for robust mechanisms to rule out any possibility of experimenter fraud. We used five pools of four photographs of physical locations from Google Earth. What the participant relates during the session is transcribed by the experimenter as a ‘mentation’. When the session was over, one of the 20 locations was randomly selected as a target and shown to the participant. Soon after the session, without knowing which location was the target, an independent judge was asked to assign similarity scores for the mentation against each of the four possible targets in the selected pool, allowing the target location to be ranked 1-4.
We adopted a quasi-experimental design with vegetarianism as our primary independent variable leading to two equal-sized participant groups. Our main hypothesis was that vegetarians would perform better than meat eaters. Secondary independent variables and associated hypotheses included those related to fasting and other dietary practices. We recruited 40 participants through convenience and snowball sampling, each of whom took part in a single trial. No other pre-selection was applied, although participants were at least interested in the study’s topic and so open to the possibility of psi. We were aware before the experiment took place that this number of trials is underpowered and would be unlikely to yield results reaching statistical significance. The study was preregistered and is also to be included in a prospective meta-analysis of ganzfeld studies.
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Michael J. Daw is a doctoral researcher at the University of Northampton, UK. He is a member of the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium, and of the UK Vegan Society Researcher Network. He has a Masters degree in computation and worked for over 20 years in senior university management and research support roles. He has also pursued careers in software engineering and teaching high school mathematics, and has served on the boards of two local environmental charities, alongside involvement in environmental activism for over 30 years. He lives in West Yorkshire, UK.
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Program chaired by Jacob W. Glazier. Download the Abstracts at https://parapsych.org/uploaded_files/pdfs/00/00/00/01/26/2023_pa_abstracts_of_presented_papers.pdf
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Published on January 15, 2025
