Daryl Bem

Introduction

Daryl J. Bem (born June 10, 1938) is an American social psychologist and professor emeritus at Cornell University. He proposed self-perception theory, the most frequently cited alternative to Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, and spent his early career on attitudes, group decision making, and personality assessment. Late in that career he became the most prominent mainstream psychologist of his generation to argue that experimental evidence supports psi — extrasensory perception and precognition. His 2011 paper "Feeling the Future," published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, reported nine experiments in which participants appeared to respond to events that had not yet happened. The paper was never retracted, but it drew immediate statistical and methodological criticism, direct replications failed, and its publication is now widely credited with accelerating the methodological reforms that reshaped psychology during the 2010s.

Early Life and Education

Bem received a bachelor's degree in physics from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, in 1960 and began graduate work in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The civil rights movement was then transforming American race relations, and he became absorbed by the rapid change in attitudes toward desegregation in the South. That change, he has said, made the study of attitudes more interesting to him than the study of matter, and he switched fields to become a social psychologist specializing in attitudes and public opinion. He completed a doctorate in social psychology at the University of Michigan in 1964. In 1965 he married Sandra Lipsitz Bem, herself a psychologist, who spent her career at Cornell and is best known for gender schema theory.

Academic and Professional Career

Bem taught at Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, Harvard University, and Cornell University, joining Cornell in 1978 and retiring in 2007 as professor emeritus. His work ranged widely: group decision making, handwriting analysis, person perception, personality theory and assessment, and the development of sexual orientation. He testified before a subcommittee of the United States Senate on the psychological effects of police interrogation and served as an expert witness in court cases involving sex discrimination.

From the 1990s he devoted increasing attention to parapsychology. With Charles Honorton he published a 1994 review in Psychological Bulletin of the autoganzfeld experiments, a body of work in which a receiver, seated in conditions of mild sensory deprivation, attempts to identify a target being concentrated on by a sender in another room. They concluded that the procedure provided good security against deception and sensory cues and that the results warranted the attention of the wider psychological community. That conclusion was contested by Ray Hyman, who argued the experiments did not rule out sensory leakage; by Julie Milton and Richard Wiseman, whose 1999 meta-analysis of thirty experiments from other laboratories found no effect greater than chance; and by Susan Blackmore, who noted that many of the studies in the original database came from a single laboratory and that some had documented procedural problems.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Self-perception theory

Bem's best-known contribution began with a 1967 article in Psychological Review and was stated at length in 1972. The claim is that people come to know their own attitudes by observing their own behavior and the circumstances in which it occurs, inferring them much as an outside observer would. A person watching someone else deliver a speech in favor of a political leader would infer that the speaker supports that leader; a person asked to deliver such a speech will likewise come to hold a more favorable view.

The theory was offered as an alternative to dissonance theory, and the two were initially treated as rivals. Bem and Keith McConnell supplied the most-cited demonstration in 1970: after students at Carnegie Mellon wrote essays opposing student control of the curriculum, their attitudes shifted in that direction, yet when asked what they had believed at the outset they insisted they had always held the new view — evidence, Bem argued, that people infer attitudes from behavior rather than introspecting on a preexisting state. Subsequent work treated the theories as largely complementary: dissonance processes appear to dominate when behavior strongly contradicts a firmly held attitude and produces arousal, while self-perception offers the better account when prior attitudes are weak, ambiguous, or unformed.

The "exotic becomes erotic" theory

In a 1996 article in Psychological Review, Bem proposed a developmental account of sexual orientation. Biological variables, he argued, shape temperament; temperament leads some children toward sex-typical activities and others toward sex-atypical ones; a gender-nonconforming child therefore feels different from same-sex peers, and that sense of difference produces a nonspecific physiological arousal which at adolescence is transformed into sexual attraction. The theory drew on evidence that childhood gender nonconformity is one of the strongest available predictors of adult homosexuality, for both men and women, and on prospective studies following gender-nonconforming boys into adulthood.

The theory has been influential but is contested. Critics note that it rests largely on retrospective self-reports, that prospective evidence exists mainly for boys rather than girls, and that some cross-cultural cases sit awkwardly with it — for example, among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea, where homosexual acts were ritually required of adolescent boys, adult rates of homosexual behavior were not markedly elevated. Bem himself discussed such cases as apparent counterexamples.

"Feeling the Future" and the psi controversy

Bem's 2011 paper applied a distinctive strategy: rather than inventing a new psi paradigm, he "time-reversed" established psychological effects so that the stimulus event occurred after the participant's response had been recorded. Priming, habituation, retroactive facilitation of recall, and approach-avoidance reactions were each tested in this backward direction. Across nine experiments with more than a thousand participants, eight produced one-tailed results significant at the .05 level, with a mean effect size of about 0.22; effects were larger for erotic stimuli and among participants high in stimulus seeking.

The response was swift and overwhelmingly negative. Eric-Jan Wagenmakers and colleagues argued that the analyses had been partly exploratory while being tested as though confirmatory, and that a default Bayesian test showed the evidence to be weak; Bem, with Jessica Utts and Wesley Johnson, replied, and Wagenmakers and colleagues issued a clarification. Jeffrey Rouder and Richard Morey computed a meta-analytic Bayes factor and concluded that a change in odds of roughly forty was negligible against the prior implausibility of precognition. James Alcock reviewed the nine experiments and identified numerous procedural problems, including changes to procedure partway through a session and the pooling of results from tests with different probabilities of significance. Two papers in 2012 argued that the number of significant results Bem reported was improbably high given the effect sizes involved — a pattern characteristic of selective reporting. Direct replications failed: Stuart Ritchie, Chris French, and Richard Wiseman did not reproduce the retroactive facilitation of recall, and Jeff Galak with Leif Nelson, Joe Simmons, and Robert LeBoeuf reported an average effect size of 0.04 across seven replications involving more than three thousand participants. The Ritchie team's difficulty in publishing their result — several journals declined it for being a replication, and the British Journal of Psychology declined it after reservations from a referee later confirmed to be Bem himself — became a widely cited illustration of publication bias.

Bem defended the work. He and his co-authors stressed that the experiments were conducted and reported according to the standards of the time and argued that the standard of proof demanded of psi was far higher than that applied to ordinary findings. In 2015 he, Patrizio Tressoldi, Thomas Rabeyron, and Michael Duggan published a meta-analysis of ninety experiments from thirty-three laboratories in fourteen countries, reporting a combined effect that they described as exceeding six sigma, with a small overall effect size and a p-curve estimate close to the original; they also reported that excluding Bem's own experiments still left a positive effect across independent replications. Critics have replied that such meta-analytic databases are vulnerable to publication bias and to the inclusion of low-quality studies, and that pre-registered replications have not supported the claim.

Major Publications

  • Beliefs, Attitudes, and Human Affairs (1970)
  • Bem, D. J. (1967). Self-perception: An alternative interpretation of cognitive dissonance phenomena. Psychological Review, 74, 183-200.
  • Bem, D. J. (1972). Self-perception theory. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 6, pp. 1-62).
  • Bem, D. J., & Honorton, C. (1994). Does psi exist? Replicable evidence for an anomalous process of information transfer. Psychological Bulletin, 115, 4-18.
  • Bem, D. J. (1996). Exotic becomes erotic: Interpreting the biological correlates of sexual orientation. Psychological Review, 103, 320-335.
  • Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 407-425.
  • Bem, D. J., Tressoldi, P. E., Rabeyron, T., & Duggan, M. (2015). Feeling the future: A meta-analysis of 90 experiments on the anomalous anticipation of random future events. F1000Research, 4, 1188.

Impact and Legacy

Self-perception theory is a fixture of social psychology textbooks, and the decades of research it provoked clarified when attitude change is driven by internal discomfort and when it is simply inferred from behavior. The exotic-becomes-erotic theory, though contested, was among the first serious attempts to connect temperament and childhood experience to sexual orientation and stimulated a large literature on gender nonconformity.

Bem's psi work has had a different kind of influence. Commentators across the spectrum have identified the publication of "Feeling the Future" as a turning point: a respected researcher using ordinary methods, published in a top-tier journal, reporting a result that almost no psychologist believed. That combination forced a public reckoning with flexible analysis, publication bias, and the meaning of statistical significance, and it helped motivate preregistration, registered replication reports, open data, and the wider reform movement associated with the replication crisis. Some historians of the episode date the methodological crisis in psychology to this paper rather than to the later large-scale replication projects.

The disagreement about what to conclude has not been settled. Bem's critics hold that the paper should never have been published, that its publication damaged the credibility of psychology, and that the replications and meta-analytic work do not survive scrutiny for publication bias. Bem and his defenders reply that the methods were conventional for their era, that the same flexibility critics deplore was then standard across the field, that his meta-analysis reports a small but reliable effect across dozens of laboratories, and that the ferocity of the reaction reflected prior disbelief rather than the data. Skeptics answer that a claim contradicting well-established findings in physics and biology requires evidence proportionate to its improbability, and that this standard was not met. What is not in dispute is that the episode changed how psychology evaluates its own evidence.

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References

  • Bem, D. J. (1972). Self-perception theory. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 6, pp. 1-62). Academic Press.

Last updated: 2026-10-20

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