Can stopping at the right moment make someone seem gifted?

You are trying to guess a hidden image. After a few successes, you end the session, pleased with your score. On another day, you continue after several errors, hoping to recover. Your decision to carry on therefore depends on your results.

This behaviour can change the pattern of results even without any special ability. It needs to be taken into account before applying a statistical calculation that assumes a fixed number of trials.

A study by Helané Wahbeh and colleagues analysed more than 25 million trials from a clairvoyance platform. Series with a predetermined number of trials remained at the level expected by chance. The distinctive patterns in freely stopped series were largely reproduced by computer simulations that incorporated stopping habits.

This does not mean that all psi experiments can be explained this way. The finding concerns this platform and the analyses performed.

When you stop is part of the experiment. One simple way to test an ability is to announce the number of trials beforehand and then retain the entire series. Other methods allow ongoing monitoring, provided that the appropriate statistical rules are planned in advance.

Further reading: Bulletin of 25 September 2026.

Source: Wahbeh et al. (2026), “Probing Top Performers in a Forced-Choice Clairvoyant Task”, Journal of Anomalistics. Overview by the research team.