19 Facts About Daryl Bem

Daryl J Bem was born on June 10,1938 and is a social psychologist and professor emeritus at Cornell University.

Daryl Bem is the originator of the self-perception theory of attitude formation and change.

Daryl Bem obtained his PhD in social psychology from the University of Michigan in 1964.

Daryl Bem taught at Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford, Harvard, and Cornell University.

Daryl Bem started at Cornell in 1978 and retired in 2007, becoming a professor emeritus.

In 1972, Daryl Bem proposed the self-perception theory of attitude change, which proposes a different mechanism of change than that of Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory.

Daryl Bem's exotic becomes erotic theory presents one possible explanation as to what differentiates the etiology of homosexuality from heterosexuality.

Daryl Bem noted that because of their temperament, which is influenced by biological variables such as genetic factors, some children will be attracted to activities that are commonly enjoyed by other children of the same gender, while others will prefer activities that are typical of the other gender.

Daryl Bem theorized that this makes a gender-conforming child feel different from opposite-gender children, while gender-nonconforming children will feel different from children of their own gender.

Daryl Bem believes that this feeling of difference evokes physiological arousal when the child is near members of the gender which the child considers as being "different".

Daryl Bem based this theory in part on the finding that a majority of gay men and lesbians report being gender-nonconforming during their childhood years.

Daryl Bem drew from six prospective studies, longitudinal studies that began with gender-nonconforming boys around age 7 and followed them into adolescence and adulthood; a majority of the gender nonconforming boys become gay or bisexual as adults.

Daryl Bem cited cross-cultural studies which "appear to contradict the EBE theory assertion", such as the Sambia tribe in Papua New Guinea, which ritually enforced homosexual acts among teenagers, yet once these boys reached adulthood, only a small proportion of men continued to engage in homosexual behaviour - similar to levels observed in the United States.

In parapsychology, Daryl Bem is known for his defense of the ganzfeld experiment as evidence of psi, more commonly known as extrasensory perception or psychic phenomena.

Julie Milton and Richard Wiseman who discovered errors in Daryl Bem's research carried out a meta-analysis of ganzfeld experiments in other laboratories.

In 2011, Daryl Bem published the article "Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that offered statistical evidence for psi.

Daryl Bem appeared on MSNBC and The Colbert Report to discuss the experiment.

In 2012, two independent articles found that the number of rejections of the null hypothesis reported by Daryl Bem is abnormally high, given the properties of the experiments and reported effect sizes.

Daryl Bem married Sandra Daryl Bem, a psychology professor, in 1965.