Daryl J. Bem (born 10 June 1938) is an American social psychologist and professor emeritus at Cornell University, best known within mainstream psychology as the originator of self-perception theory, and on The Vault for his controversial 2011 studies into Precognition.
Early life and education
Bem originally trained in physics, earning a B.A. from Reed College in Oregon in 1960 before beginning graduate work in physics at MIT. The civil rights movement's effect on American attitudes toward desegregation drew his interest away from physics and toward social psychology, and he went on to complete a Ph.D. in social psychology at the University of Michigan in 1964. He taught at Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford, and Harvard before joining Cornell University in the late 1970s, where he remained until his retirement in 2007.
Self-perception theory
Bem's best-known contribution to mainstream psychology is self-perception theory, proposed around 1967 and developed through the following decade. The theory offers an alternative to Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory, arguing that people often infer their own attitudes and emotions by observing their own behaviour, in situations where no clear prior attitude exists — rather than attitudes driving behaviour, behaviour can end up shaping the attitude a person believes they held all along.
Exotic Becomes Erotic theory
Bem also proposed the "Exotic Becomes Erotic" theory of the development of sexual orientation, arguing that childhood temperament and a sense of feeling different from one's peers of the same gender contributes to later erotic attraction toward that gender. He has been called as an expert witness in a number of legal proceedings concerning sex discrimination and sexual orientation.
Parapsychology research
Alongside his mainstream psychology career, Bem conducted research into ganzfeld experiments and other psi phenomena, co-authoring a widely cited 1994 review with parapsychologist Charles Honorton arguing that ganzfeld results constituted evidence for psi, following on from Honorton's own work at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit in Edinburgh.
In 2011, Bem published a set of nine experiments in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology under the title "Feeling the Future," reporting statistically significant evidence that participants' responses could be influenced by stimuli they had not yet been shown — a proposed reversed-time analogue of well-established psychological effects. The paper drew unusual attention for applying mainstream experimental psychology's own methods to a precognition claim, rather than parapsychology's specialised protocols, and became a flashpoint in psychology's wider replication crisis: independent attempts to reproduce the results largely failed, and critics identified methodological and statistical weaknesses, including flexible stopping rules and after-the-fact analysis choices.