Mediumship in His Trade Book

Mediumship

In his trade book the Afterlife Experiments, clinical psychologist and University of Arizona professor Gary Schwartz offers "breakthrough scientific evidence of life after death." Based on a series of studies Schwartz and his colleagues conducted using spirit mediums, the author concludes that human consciousness does indeed survive the death of the body. Trance or spirit mediums are persons who claim they can channel, or communicate with, the souls of the dead. As Schwartz himself admits, "mediumship does not have a solid reputation for integrity," and usually more resembles "stage magic instead of science," (52; 51). Therefore, Schwartz undertook his research under a climate of skepticism, especially as he was a well-established clinical psychologist who graduated from Harvard. Publishing his findings in a trade book such as this one is a huge professional risk: laypersons unfamiliar with proper, established scientific methodology will be far more forgiving than Schwartz's colleagues in academia. Therefore, Schwartz can easily gloss over weaknesses and flaws in the studies and still present the material to the general public in a convincing manner. Moreover, the topic of mediumship, especially as it applies to communicating with dead loved ones, has a wide-ranging appeal. Not only did the New Age movement popularize such topics as the survival of consciousness but people are always going to be interested in the possibility of life after death and the sentimental notion of communicating with departed loved ones.

Schwartz's research began after some promising findings regarding the connection between love and health. Some early findings indicated that "men who perceived themselves as coming from the most loving parents had the lowest rates of physical diseases," (Schwartz 21). These initial research reviews also pointed to the possibility of people communicating with their loved ones from the beyond. Thus the author launched a series of supposedly scientifically-designed studies to determine whether "science can establish that love exists, that consciousness exists, and the survival of consciousness exists, in the same way that science has established that gravity exists," (11). However, as Ray Hyman points out in his article "How Not to Test Mediums," Schwartz's studies were far from being scientifically designed. Hyman, who actually practiced palmistry professionally and served as an expert on one of Schwartz's initial research panels, accuses Schwartz of designing one of the most flawed research projects he had encountered: "Probably no other extended program in psychical research deviates so much from accepted norms of scientific methodology as this one does."

Hyman offers numerous counter-responses to Schwartz's research results, pointing out essential, glaring flaws in his research methodology. The flaws that Hyman identifies in Schwartz's studies include the fallacy of personal validation, subjective validation, confirmation bias, belief perseverance, demand characteristics, and the foot-in-the-door phenomenon. Hyman also accuses Schwartz of drawing a false conclusion based on Occam's Razor, that the simplest explanation is the correct one, asserting that Schwartz never actually proves that consciousness survives death at all but rather leaps to that conclusion because the researcher could offer no other explanation for his findings. Hyman also notes that one of the main problems with Schwartz's research is that mediums too often rely on nonverbal cues and sensory leakage.

One of the most glaring faults with Schwartz's research rests on what Hyman calls the "illusion of specificity that surrounds language." When the mediums respond to one of the "sitters" Schwartz's studies, they offer information about departed loved ones that is significantly general and subject to misinterpretation. For example, a medium named John performed a reading involving the author, Gary Schwartz. John the medium senses a "female S-sounding name," mentions also a person whose astrological sign is Gemini (Schwartz 191). There are many female S-sounding names and Schwartz never actually reveals the name of his mother or what letters her name contains. Schwartz happens to be a Gemini, but John had a one in twelve chance of getting that one right. John continues to take stabs at guessing more about Gary Schwartz's family, guesses that are completely and probably deliberately vague. Not only could the mediums be making wild and general guesses but they could have also acquired information through traditional sources or nonverbal cues. For example, the medium might have known beforehand that Schwartz's birthday fell during the Gemini month, and that his mother's name contained the letter "S" in it. Barring such obvious fraud, guesswork seems as plausible an explanation as any other.

Schwartz fields accusations of fraud at several points in his book. One of his rebuttals is that "mediums need not be perfect," they just have to be better than everyone else (54). In fact, Schwartz designed all of his studies with this premise in mind, using a control group of mostly undergraduate students who had no mediumship experience. Schwartz claims that "mediums are neither frauds nor freaks," and that the experiments presented in the book proves this is that case.

Hyman states that a true control group would more closely resemble the mediums; they would have had similar life experiences and similar demographics. Although Schwartz conducted a series of experiments, each more strident than the next, only the last experiment he conducted was a double-blind study. Schwartz boasts about his double-blind study, indicating that if it doesn't prove the existence of life after death, nothing will. In the double-blind study, Schwartz claims that there was no possibility for sensory leakage or any other potential flaw in the research design.

Hyman, however, accuses Schwartz of "just another blatant attempt to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat," stating that the author twisted and spun negative results to make them appear positive, and that the results were no better than chance. Hyman further notes that Schwartz's studies and their results are deliberately vague and far too simple to be taken seriously by the scientific community.