MEANINGFULNESS IN THE I CHING USING A Q-SORT RNG METHOD.

There may be a psi component to the I Ching, an ancient Chinese system of divination (Storm, 2008). An individual accesses the system by throwing three coins six times to generate one of 64 'hexagrams' with an associated reading (i.e., forecast) about the user. In the study by Storm and Thalbourne (1998-1999), participants pre-selected 16 of 64 descriptor-pairs that corresponded to how they felt, and then generated the hexagram reading. If the reading corresponded to one of the 16 descriptor-pairs, the outcome was regarded as a 'hit'. The Q-sort method (requiring preferential ranking of all 64 descriptor-pairs) was then adopted (i) to find evidence of psi indicated by above-chance mean Q-sort scores; (ii) to test psi using a random number generator (RNG); and (iii) to test the meaningfulness in the I Ching readings. In the present study, each participant ranked a genuine reading and a decoy reading. The study also tested the sheep-goat effect where 'sheep' are shown to score higher than 'goats' on paranormal belief measures and often score higher on tests of psi. The mean Q-sort score for the whole sample was -0.07 (where MCE = 0.00); an improvement on -0.28 reported by Storm and Rock (2014). The mean Q-sort score for sheep was higher than for goats' (not significantly), as Storm and Rock (2014) also found. The difference between the mean number of yang lines for sheep (3.06) was also higher than that for goats (2.67), and marginally significant (Storm and Rock (2014) did not find a significant difference). Meaningfulness of the hexagram reading correlated significantly with relevance of the reading, suggesting that sometimes participants' primary values and their specific concerns may have been equally represented in the readings, or sometimes participants could not make a distinction. A Barnum effect seemed evident but was not disproportionately attributable to sheep. Post hoc analysis showed that mid-range scorers on paranormal belief measures (i.e., 'indecisives') scored worse than goats on all three psi measures, while sheep still yielded higher mean scores than both groups. These effects replicate those found by Storm and Rock (2014). If this three-way effect is pervasive across psi studies, the two-group method (sheep and goats only), formed by conventional methods such as median split, produces misleading evidence of the psi capacities of both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]