In a sense, Caroline Watt’s career as a parapsychologist begins with the publication of an anti-totalitarian novel—Darkness at Noon (1940), author Arthur Koestler’s most famous work. Koestler, who committed double suicide with his wife in 1983, left £1 million to found a chair in parapsychology at a British university. After several refusals, the chair landed at the University of Edinburgh, where Robert L. Morris became its first occupant in 1985. Watt, who cofounded the unit, became the second in 2016 following a period of reorganization after Morris’s 2004 death.

The fanfare of press interest over the chair’s creation and Morris’s appointment coincided with Watt’s 1984 graduation in psychology from the University of St Andrews. One of the final exam questions asked students to outline the research program and methods they would use to investigate parapsychology if they were applying for the new chair. In response, Watt suggested studying telepathic exchanges between twins and how to eliminate normal explanations. After graduation, Watt wrote to Morris saying she had no prior opinions about parapsychology, but she was curious. Was there anything she could do? A year and a half later, after Morris took up residence, he invited her to apply for the position of research assistant, and she joined the nascent group alongside Richard Wiseman, now well-known for using his twin interests in magic and psychology to study the psychology of deception, and Peter Lamont, a magician interested in historical issues in parapsychology.

Today, the Koestler Parapsychology Unit is a small research group within the psychology department, an arrangement Watt praises, noting that it’s more common in Europe and the United Kingdom for parapsychology units to be situated this way within established research centers. While she admits there are downsides to being in the academic world of committees and teaching topics that may not be of personal interest, “The upside is that you know the system of peer review and grant applications and how universities run. I think there’s a benefit from rubbing shoulders with other researchers.” In some cases, multidisciplinary collaboration is a benefit: “If you’re interested for example in if a psychic ability exists, what is the mechanism by which you can read minds?” She cites Dean Radin’s work, which has consulted physicists.

Morris (seen here in a 2002 interview) was exceptional in that both skeptics and believers trusted him. “He had great interest in what’s not psychic but looks like it,” Watt says.

The unit never did much testing of claimants, though Morris—aided by Wiseman’s knowledge of magic—would look over the methodology of planned tests. One factor was James Randi’s then-recent Project Alpha, in which Randi played two fake psychics in parapsychology labs, where their deception was never spotted. “I think it was a useful experience, because parapsychologists became more cautious after that and followed the recommendation that researchers should try to involve magicians in their work when testing claimants,” Watt says. The biggest initial effect, however, was to deter many parapsychologists from testing claimants.

Project Alpha also led many skeptics to write off parapsychology entirely, an attitude Watt has encountered personally.

Watt has reasons for staying in the field. The first is genuine, though pandemic-interrupted, interest in whether people have the abilities they claim and individual differences in their performance on tests. Among her research questions are the relationship between childhood experiences and adult paranormal belief; the so-called “experimenter effect”; and patterns emerging from large Ganzfeld studies.

The second is methodological; Watt argues that the field has historically made significant breakthroughs in science practice. She cites, for example, the German psychiatrist Hans Berger, whose years trying to measure “psychic energy” eventually led to the EEG. “He was called a crackpot, but he did invent something to measure brain activity, which was thought impossible at the time.” In a blog posting, she also cites the placebo effect, double-blind testing, and the use of randomization in experimental design. Watt believes that the difficulty of ruling out alternative hypotheses when testing for psi is part of what makes it interesting: “You learn a lot about doing good research in the process of eliminating counter-explanations and artifacts.”

Parapsychology also pioneered methods for handling the growing replication crisis in psychology, medicine, and other fields. “Parapsychologists have been dealing with these issues for decades,” Watt says. In 2012, she and Jim Kennedy founded a study registry to counter reporting and publication bias. In a 2019 paper, Watt, Wiseman, and Diana Kornbrot told the story of an obscure 1970s parapsychology journal at the University of Utrecht, which pioneered registered reports, requiring researchers to pre-specify aspects of their studies with the journals that will publish them. The decrease in statistically significant results suggest the technique has had the desired effect of reducing questionable research practices.

Watt is comfortable with that. Because her primary interest is in what leads people to believe they’ve had paranormal experiences, she says, she’s not invested in whether the experience was genuinely paranormal. “I want to know the study is well-done and we’ve come up with a definitive answer. My continued interest is to drive up the standard and move toward a more conclusive answer whether there is evidence for psi and the ESP hypothesis. That’s the mission.”