The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) was a research program at Princeton University that studied the science of psychic phenomena. It was started in 1979 by Robert G. Jahn, who was then the Dean of Engineering. PEAR focused on two main areas: psychokinesis (PK), which is the ability to influence objects with the mind, and remote viewing, which is the claimed ability to perceive distant locations. Because the topics were controversial, the program had problems with the university. Some people in the administration and faculty thought it was a problem for the university. Critics said the research did not follow strict scientific methods, used weak experiments, and used statistics incorrectly. They called it pseudoscience. PEAR ended in February 2007 and became part of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories (ICRL).

Parapsychological experiments with random event generators

PEAR used electronic devices called random event generators (REGs) to test whether people could influence the random outputs of these machines using psychokinesis. The goal was to see if test subjects could make the machines produce more high numbers, more low numbers, or stay close to an average. Most experiments used a small electronic REG, but some used a large machine similar to a pachinko game, where balls bounced down through a series of paths.

In 1986, PEAR shared data from seven years of experiments involving many trials with test subjects trying to influence random number generators. The effects observed were very small, ranging from 0.1% to 1%. While the results reached a statistical significance level of P<0.05, some people questioned the experiments’ methods, ethics, and the importance of results that barely met this threshold. The baseline used to compare results was not adjusted properly, which some researchers linked to the operators’ desire to achieve a good baseline and suggested the random number generator might not have been truly random. One test subject, believed to be a PEAR staff member, participated in 15% of all trials and contributed to half of the observed effects.

James Alcock reviewed the experiments and pointed out problems such as poor controls, incomplete documentation, and the possibility of fraud. He also noted that data selection and optional stopping were not ruled out. Alcock concluded that there was no evidence the results were due to paranormal causes.

C. E. M. Hansel, a psychologist who evaluated early PEAR experiments, stated that the studies lacked proper control groups, independent replication, and detailed descriptions. He noted that the reports provided little information about the experiments’ design, the test subjects, or the testing conditions. Physicist Milton Rothman said that the experiments started from an unrealistic assumption, ignored physical laws, and had no scientific basis.

PEAR’s findings were criticized for being hard to reproduce. For example, two German organizations failed to repeat PEAR’s results, and PEAR itself could not reproduce its own findings. A study by Stan Jeffers from York University also did not confirm PEAR’s results.