Scientific fraud, an act of deception or misrepresentation of one’s own work, which violates ethical standards. It can take the form of plagiarism or falsification of data etc. Scientific fraud has been attributed to attain high levels of personal or professional success for example those who are in a search for promotion, status or to obtain research grants. Anomalous events can be investigated within the study of collective behaviour, religion, the afterlife etc.
The use of these paradigms would reduce problems associated with sceptical attacks, low rates of replicability, and experimenter effects. There are two types of psycho kinesis; Macro PK which is clearly observable effects eg levitating a chair and Micro PK, weaker effects which are not noticible by the eye eg. Influencing the throw of a dice. There has been alot of research which has been done in to this by researchers and scientists. Uri geller is one of the most well known person with apparent psycho kinetis abilities.
He has performed in front of thousands of people by spoon bending, telepathy etc. However whenever Geller is asked to perform these things on the spot he has not been able to produce these powers. But he says this is because he did not feel strong enough at the time or because of the negative energy around him which can be known as jelous phenomena. I think that if he had these special powers he should be able to do it anytime. Walter Levy did an experiment into telepathy which he conducted on rats by connecting electrodes to the ‘pleasure zones’ on the brain of the rat.
It would shock the rats pleasure region 50% of the time. He claimed that if the rats wanted to feel more pleasure their rating was above 50% then they were using some sort of psychokinetic ability. His results showed that the rats were in a state of pleasure 54% of the time which supported his hypothesis. However his own assistant realised Levy had been tampering with the results and was caught out therefore had to step down from being the Director. There are many issues with his experiment first being it was cruel to do this experiment on animals.
Also you cannot generalise the results to humans as even if the rats had psycho kinesis it would not mean that humans would have it too. I think that Levy actually believed in telepathy and therefore was too blinded by it to realise he was doing wrong by changing the results. Fraudulent activities by the minority researchers have influenced opinions about the credibility of the research into this area. Only when all variables are controlled and the results can be fully replicated will the research in to PK and ESP be given scientific credibility.