Who is calling? An Independent Replication of a Telephone Telepathy Test

Abstract

We present the results of a new preregistered experiment aimed at testing telephone telepathy. One hundred and seventeen participants were requested to identify which one of two callers was calling to their smartphone. The correct identifications were 294 out of 604 trials, corresponding to 48.6%, slightly below the expected chance of 50%, supporting the lack of any telepathic phenomenon. A subsequent exploratory analysis, comparing the performance of the participants divided according to the cognitive strategies used to solve the task, revealed that participants claiming to have adopted intuitive strategies outperformed the participants claiming to have adopted more rational strategies (56% versus 35.4 %), suggesting that telepathic skills could be enhanced by reducing rational, controlled cognitive strategies.