Richard Kammann

Richard Kammann was associate professor of psychology at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. From 1975 he and David Marks attempted to replicate the remote-viewing experiments of Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute; their letter to Nature of August 17, 1978, reported that "we have carried out duplicate experiments, but our results do not verify their conclusions," and their book The Psychology of the Psychic (Prometheus, 1980, with a foreword by Martin Gardner) divided the work: "David Marks undertook to examine the SRI remote viewing experiments, while Dick Kammann undertook to review psychological experiments that might help explain the origins of psychic beliefs." Kammann visited SRI in December 1975, where "he was told by Puthoff that the results didn't always depend upon the on-site experimenter(s) actually looking at the source of information relayed on to the subject. According to Puthoff, each observer was like a 'beacon.'" His chapters set out "subjective validation," which "occurs when two unrelated events are perceived to be related because a belief, expectancy, or hypothesis demands or requires a relationship."¹²

He was a fellow of the CSICOP until his resignation in 1981 over the "Mars Effect" controversy, on which his paper "Statistical Numerology in the Skeptics' Response to the Mars Effect" appeared in Zetetic Scholar in December 1982 after The Humanist, Psychology Today and the Skeptical Inquirer declined it. He published on the measurement of happiness from Otago in 1984 and died that year (a library catalogue record gives his years as 1934 to 1984); the university founded the Richard Kammann Wellbeing Prize in his memory in 1986.³