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Originally Posted by scomsjw  I must admit that this is the thing that troubles me most about the Dogs that Know experiments. If you speak to dog owners and say something like "there is this theory... blah blah... have you ever noticed anything like that with your pet?" You are likley to get a lot of false positives as people buy into the suggestion. Its the same with the anecdote about telephone telepathy. If you address a group by first telling them that something exciting might be going on and then ask them if they have experienced it you will get a positive response but I'm not sure that it means anything. It reminds me of some of the tricks Uri Gellar used to get up to on tv in the seventies where he would stare into the camera and then ask people to phone in if they had a broken watch that suddenly started working again by the power of his suggestion. I recall some people testifying that they had watches with missing parts that had miraculously regenerated and they sounded very sincere. |
Well of course, if this research consisted in surveying dog (and cat) owners as to whether they observed this behaviour, it would be of very little value - except perhaps that if they answered no, there would be no point in investigating further!
The whole point is that Rupert and then Alex went on to do controlled experiments! Isn't that the way science is supposed to work?
David