Commentators have criticized Emoto for insufficient experimental controls, and for not sharing enough details of his approach with the scientific community. In addition, Emoto has been criticized for designing his experiments in ways that leave them open to human error influencing his findings.
In the day-to-day work of his group, the creativity of the photographers rather than the rigor of the experiment is an explicit policy of Emoto. Emoto freely acknowledges that he is not a scientist, and that photographers are instructed to select the most pleasing photographs.
In 2003, James Randi publicly offered Emoto one million dollars if his results can be reproduced in a double-blind study.
In 2005, Kristopher Setchfield from the Natural Science Department at Vermont published a paper that analyzed deeper motives regarding Emoto's study. In his paper, Kristopher writes,
Unfortunately for his credibility with the scientific community, Dr. Emoto sells products based on his claims. For example, the products page of Emoto's Hado website is currently offering "geometrically perfect" "Indigo water" that is "highly charged hexagonally structured concentrate," and supposedly creates "structured water" that is "more easily assimilated at the cellular level" for $35 for an eight-ounce bottle. Without providing scientific research references for the allegedly amazing qualities of his Indigo Water, Emoto's commercial venture calls to mind ethical concerns regarding his intent and motivation...questions that would not be present if any scientist had published research supporting his claims.
In 2006, Emoto published a paper together with Dean Radin and others in the peer reviewed
Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. They describe that in a double blind test approximately 2000 people in Tokyo could increase the aesthetic appeal of water stored in a room in California, compared to water in another room, solely through their positive intentions.
Triple-blind study
A better-controlled "triple-blind" follow-up study published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration did not yield positive results. More than 1,900 of Mr. Emoto's followers focused gratitude on water bottles in a vault over a period of three days. The water was then frozen and compared to two different sets of controls in a very elaborate protocol. The crystals, both "treated" and not, on average, were not considered to be particularly beautiful (scoring 1.7 on a scale of 0 to 6, where 6 was very beautiful). The treated crystals were also rated slightly less beautiful than a set of controls. An objective comparison of contrast did not reveal any significant differences among the samples.
There were, however, potential problems with the "triple-blind" follow up. As the study explains:
"In any experiment involving intention, the intentions of the "investigators" cannot be cleanly isolated from those of the nominal participants and this in turn constrains how one should properly interpret the results. In addition, there were many uncontrolled degrees of freedom in this experiment which may have allowed ‘‘unintended intentional’’ effects to creep in. They all involve human decisions, e.g. selecting six specific bottles of water from a huge population of available bottles, randomly assigning those bottles to three conditions, selecting and preparing the water drops, placing the water drop samples inside the freezer, searching for and photographing ice crystals on the frozen water drops at different magnification levels, choosing one of a largepossible set of image processing algorithms to provide an objective measure of image contrast, and so on." (Journal of Scientific Exploration Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 481—493, 2008).