Bryan Williams has been contributing occasional interesting analyses and
commentaries to the GCP for years. Most recently, in Feb 2013, he sent a
note with a description of a comprehensive look at all events in the
database that fit a general idea of supporting global harmony. He wrote,
I've recently been invited to give a general talk on parapsychology to a
spiritual group in Oklahoma in early March, and in deciding upon the
examples to give relating to mind-matter interaction research, I thought
of briefly summarizing the background and findings of the GCP. Because
this group promotes the message of peace and harmony for humanity and
the Earth, I was reminded of the exploratory analysis I did several
years back as a follow-up to the one you did in early 2001 on the GCP
events related to "global harmony" (where mass gatherings of people are
organized in order to pray or meditate for the well-being of humanity),
and I thought that was something that the group might relate to as a
possible example. As a result, I've redone the entire analysis anew, and
I wanted to share the results with you.
I went back through the accumulated formal database of GCP events from
1998 to 2012 to identify the individual events that seem to be in line
with the concept of global harmony, on the basis of two criteria:
1.) the event listing made reference to prayer, meditation, ceremony,
ritual, healing, humanity, Earth/nature, and any other synonyms of a
similar context.
2.) the description of the event was detailed enough that it seemed
reasonably apparent that the intended theme, focus, or goal of the event
was in line with the concept of global harmony (i.e., it had to have a
positive message for the future of humanity, promote peace or healing to
the Earth/nature or some aspect of human society), and that it
encouraged the shared participation of a large group of people.
For this analysis, I extended the event inclusion criteria a bit to
include a small number of mass social activation events (e.g., public
demonstrations for peace, anti-war rallies, etc.) because although these
events tend to be quite different in activity from organized meditation
and prayer events, both seem to have the same goal of promoting global
harmony in mind.
I identified 110 events in total, which are listed in the table found in
the attached Adobe PDF file. Collectively, these 110 events have a
Stouffer's Z = 3.283 (p = .00051), with an associated odds ratio of
about 1,960 to 1. The mean Z was 0.313, which was comparable to the mean
Z for the formal GCP database. Variability is considerable for these 110
events, as well (Chi-Square = 157.62, 110 df, p = .0016). The attached
graph shows the results summary in terms of a cumulative summation of
Z-scores, akin to the overall GCP events graph. The event numbers
correspond to the event listing in the PDF file.
Normally I put here a caveat to the effect it is important to
keep in mind that we have only a tiny
statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish
signal from noise. But when we put together a large number of individual
events, in this case more than 100, the statistics become more reliable
and interpretable. It looks like these ephemeral moments when we are
"just wishing" or "merely praying" are effective in the world. We may
not see the effects we hope for in a big way, but is it not likely that
the intentions aimed at global harmony are effective in the real world?
It is a good guess they are more potent there than in our
abstract physical system of random number generators.
