Precognition describes the ability to anticipate information about a future event before this event occurs. The goal of our study was to test the occurrence of precognition by trying to replicate three experiments of the most central study in the field (Bem, 2011, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). In this study, Bem time-reversed wellestablished psychological effects so that a “causal” stimulus appeared after the participants gave their response. We conducted two priming experiments and a free recall experiment in the backward “precognition” version and, as a control manipulation, in the classic forward version. More than 2000 participants participated via the Internet; thus, our study had high statistical power. The results showed no precognition effects at all. We further conducted exploratory post hoc analyses on different variables and questionnaire items and found some significant effects. Further studies should validate these potentially interesting findings by using theory-driven hypotheses, preregistrations, and confirmatory data analyses.
