Global Harmony Replication
Bryan Williams has been contributing occasional interesting analyses and commentaries to the GCP for years. In Feb 2013, he sent a note with a description of a comprehensive look at all events in the database that fit the general idea of supporting global harmony. More recently (2014) he has written a Technical Note to describe and update this work. The brief description in Bryan's cover letter below gives the rationale and procedures.
I've recently been invited to give a general talk on parapsychology to a spiritual group in Oklahoma in early March, and in deciding upon the examples to give relating to mind-matter interaction research, I thought of briefly summarizing the background and findings of the GCP. Because this group promotes the message of peace and harmony for humanity and the Earth, I was reminded of the exploratory analysis I did several years back as a follow-up to the one you did in early 2001 on the GCP events related to "global harmony" (where mass gatherings of people are organized in order to pray or meditate for the well-being of humanity), and I thought that was something that the group might relate to as a possible example. As a result, I've redone the entire analysis anew, and I wanted to share the results with you.
I went back through the accumulated formal database of GCP events from 1998 to 2012 to identify the individual events that seem to be in line with the concept of global harmony, on the basis of two criteria:
1.) the event listing made reference to prayer, meditation, ceremony, ritual, healing, humanity, Earth/nature, and any other synonyms of a similar context.
2.) the description of the event was detailed enough that it seemed reasonably apparent that the intended theme, focus, or goal of the event was in line with the concept of global harmony (i.e., it had to have a positive message for the future of humanity, promote peace or healing to the Earth/nature or some aspect of human society), and that it encouraged the shared participation of a large group of people.
For this analysis, I extended the event inclusion criteria a bit to include a small number of mass social activation events (e.g., public demonstrations for peace, anti-war rallies, etc.) because although these events tend to be quite different in activity from organized meditation and prayer events, both seem to have the same goal of promoting global harmony in mind.
I identified 110 events in total, which are listed in the table found in the attached Adobe PDF file. Collectively, these 110 events have a Stouffer's Z = 3.283 (p = .00051), with an associated odds ratio of about 1,960 to 1. The mean Z was 0.313, which was comparable to the mean Z for the formal GCP database. Variability is considerable for these 110 events, as well (Chi-Square = 157.62, 110 df, p = .0016). The attached graph shows the results summary in terms of a cumulative summation of Z-scores, akin to the overall GCP events graph. The event numbers correspond to the event listing in the PDF file.
