Daryl Bem

Daryl J. Bem (born June 10, 1938) is a social psychologist and professor emeritus at Cornell University. He is the originator of the self-perception theory of attitude change, and has carried out research on psi phenomena (a technical term for extra-sensory perception), group decision making, handwriting analysis, sexual orientation and personality theory and assessment.

Life

Biography

Bem received a B.A. in physics from Reed College in 1960, and began graduate work in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The civil rights movement had just begun, and he became so intrigued with the changing attitudes toward desegregation in the American South that he decided to switch fields and pursue a career as a social psychologist specializing in attitudes and public opinion. He obtained his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Michigan in 1964, and has since taught at Carnegie-Mellon University, Stanford, Harvard, and Cornell University. He started at Cornell in 1978 and retired from there in 2007, becoming a professor emeritus. He married Sandra Lipsitz, also a psychology professor.

Bem is coauthor of an introductory textbook in psychology and the author of Beliefs, Attitudes, and Human Affairs (1970). He testified before a subcommittee of the United States Senate on the psychological effects of police interrogation, and has served as an expert witness in court cases involving sex discrimination.

Career

Bem is perhaps best known for his theory of "self-perception", the most oft-cited competitor to Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory. According to the self-perception theory, people infer their attitudes from their own behavior much as an outside observer might. For example, a person asked to give a pro-Fidel Castro speech would consequently view him or herself as more in favor of Castro.

In parapsychology, Bem is known for his defense of the ganzfeld experiment as empirical evidence of psi, more commonly known as extra-sensory perception or psychic phenomena. Bem also supports the idea of a connection between psi and quantum phenomena. More recently, Bem has investigated backward causation.

Exotic Becomes Erotic theory

Bem's Exotic Becomes Erotic theory (EBE) presents one possible explanation as to what differentiates the etiology of homosexuality from heterosexuality. Bem theorized that the influence of biological factors on sexual orientation may be mediated by experiences in childhood, that the child's temperament predisposes the child to prefer certain activities over others. Bem noted that, because of their temperament, which is influenced by biological variables such as genetic factors, some children will be attracted to activities that are commonly enjoyed by other children of the same gender, while others will prefer activities that are typical of the other gender. Bem theorized that this makes a gender-conforming child feel different from opposite-gender children, while gender-nonconforming children will feel different from children of their own gender. Bem believes that this feeling of difference evokes physiological arousal when the child is near members of the gender which the child considers as being "different". Bem theorizes that this physiological arousal is later transformed into sexual arousal: that, as adults, these people become sexually attracted to the gender which they see as different, or "exotic".

Bem based this theory in part on the finding that a majority of gay men and lesbians report being gender-nonconforming during their childhood years. A meta-analysis of 48 studies showed childhood gender nonconformity to be the strongest predictor of a homosexual orientation for both men and women. Bem also noted that, in a study by the Kinsey Institute of approximately 1000 gay men and lesbians (and a control group of 500 heterosexual men and women), 63% of both gay men and lesbians reported that they were gender nonconforming in childhood (i.e., did not like activities typical of their sex), compared with only 10-15% of heterosexual men and women. Bem also drew from six prospective studies, longitudinal studies that began with gender-nonconforming boys around age 7 and followed them into adolescence and adulthood; a majority (63%) of the gender nonconforming boys become gay or bisexual as adults.

"Feeling the Future" and the resulting controversy

In 2011, Bem published the article "Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that offered statistical evidence for psi. If "Feeling the Future" is correct, it would provide evidence for psi, significantly altering the assumption of the linear nature of time, challenging the very core of modern scientific thought on the matter. Both the presentation of this article by a highly respected researcher, and the decision of an upper tier journal to publish it has engendered much controversy. Not only has the paper's publication led to a criticism of the paper itself, but it also prompted a wider debate on the validity of peer review process for allowing such a paper to be published. Bem has appeared on MSNBC and The Colbert Report discussing the experiment.

The methods that Bem uses in his experimentation itself has been viewed as controversial as well. According to understood statistical methodology, Bem incorrectly provides one-sided p values when he should have used a two-sided p values. This could possibly account for the marginally significant results that he produced in his experiment. A rebuttal to the Wagenmakers et al. critique by Bem and two statisticians was subsequently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Professor of Psychology, member of CSI and Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, James Alcock after evaluating Bem's 9 experiments claimed to have found metaphorical "dirty test tubes", serious methodological flaws such as changing the procedures partway through the experiments and combining results of tests with different chances of significance. The amount of actual tests done is unknown and no explanation of how it was determined that participants had "settled down" after seeing erotic images was given. Alcock concludes that almost everything that could go wrong with this 9 trial experiment did go wrong. Bem's response to Alcock's critique appeared online at the Skeptical Inquirer website and Alcock replied to these comments in a third article at the same website.

One of the nine experiments in Bem's study ('Retroactive Facilitation of Recall') has since been replicated by scientists Stuart Ritchie, Chris French, and Richard Wiseman who found no evidence of precognition. Wiseman has also set up a register to keep track of other replicating efforts and plans to conduct a meta-analysis on registered replication efforts, beginning Dec, 1st 2011. However, at least one other replication of this experiment, also registered on Wiseman's site, successfully replicated Bem's findings.

Selected publications

• Bem DJ (1972). Self-Perception Theory. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 6, pp. 1–62). New York: Academic Press, ISBN 9780120152063

• Bem DJ (1970). Beliefs, Attitudes, and Human Affairs - Wadsworth Pub Co, ISBN 9780818589065

• RL Atkinson, RC Atkinson, EE Smith, DJ Bem, Introduction to Psychology 1990 - Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

• Bem DJ . An experimental analysis of self-persuasion. Attitude change: the competing views, 1971

• A Caspi, GH Elder, DJ Bem Moving against the world: Life-course patterns of explosive children. Developmental Psychology, 1987

• A Caspi, GH Elder, DJ Bem Moving away from the world: Life-course patterns of shy children. Developmental Psychology, 1988

• DJ Bem, C Honorton Does psi exist? Replicable evidence for an anomalous process of information transfer. Psychological Bulletin, 1994

• DJ Bem, HK McConnell Testing the self-perception explanation of dissonance phenomena: On the salience of premanipulation attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1970

• Bem DJ. Exotic becomes erotic: interpreting the biological correlates of sexual orientation. Arch Sex Behav. 2000 Dec;29(6):531-48. PMID 11100261

• Bem DJ. Is EBE theory supported by the evidence? Is it androcentric? A reply to Peplau et al. (1998) Psychol Rev. 1998 Apr;105(2):395-8. PMID 9577244

• Caspi A, Bem DJ, Elder GH Jr. Continuities and consequences of interactional styles across the life course. J Pers. 1989 Jun;57(2):375-406. PMID 2769561

• SL Bem, DJ Bem Does Sex-biased Job Advertising" Aid and Abet" Sex Discrimination? Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1973

• Bem DJ. Toward a response style theory of persons in situations. Nebr Symp Motiv. 1983:201-31. PMID 6843717

• Bem DJ. Predicting more of the people more of the time: some thoughts on the Allen-Potkay studies of intraindividual variability. J Pers. 1977 Sep;45(3):327-33. PMID 894467

• Bem DJ. Constructing cross-situational consistencies in behavior: some thoughts on Alker's critique of Mischel. J Pers. 1972 Mar;40(1):17-26. PMID 5013145

• Bem DJ, McConnell HK. Testing the self-perception explanation of dissonance phenomena: on the salience of premanipulation attitudes. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1970 Jan;14(1):23-31. PMID 5435536

• Bem DJ. Self-perception: An alternative interpretation of cognitive dissonance phenomena. Psychol Rev. 1967 May;74(3):183-200. PMID 5342882

• Bem DJ. Inducing belief in false confessions. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1966 Jun;3(6):707-10. PMID 5939010

• Wallach MA, Kogan N, Bem DJ. Group influence on individual risk taking. J Abnorm Soc Psychol. 1962 Aug;65:75-86. PMID 14004673

External links

• Official Page, Site of Cornell University
• Personal Home Page
• Publications online at Personal Home Page