Joseph Banks Rhine (1895–1980) turned parapsychology into an experimental discipline. Before him, psi research was a matter of séance protocols and private investigations; after him, it was a matter of cards, dice, statistics and blinded protocols. His laboratory at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, was from 1930 to 1965 the world centre of psi research – and it is the methodological root from which the CIA's Stargate programme, Gary Schwartz's VERITAS work and Julie Beischel's quintuple-blind methodology later grew.
From botanist to psi researcher
Rhine was born in 1895 in Pennsylvania into a rural Methodist family. He studied biology and earned his PhD in botany at the University of Chicago in 1925. In the same year, his wife Louisa Ella Weckesser – whom he had married in 1920 – also completed her doctorate in botany. Scientifically, the Rhines were a double-track natural-science couple.
The turning point came in 1922. In Chicago the two heard a lecture by Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, who had turned to Spiritualism after the loss of his son in the First World War. Rhine was initially sceptical. But the question – whether the phenomena described in séances might be open to scientific investigation – would not let go of him. In 1926 he moved to Harvard to work with the British psychologist William McDougall, one of the best-known academics of the century, who took the subject seriously. In 1927 he followed McDougall to the newly founded Duke University in Durham, North Carolina – and stayed there until his death.
The Duke laboratory, 1930
In 1930 Rhine established a small research unit at Duke's Department of Psychology – the first university parapsychology unit in the world. His programme was methodologically radically simple: not the "large" phenomena (materialisations, trance voices) should be examined, but small, statistically tractable effects. If telepathy exists, then it must be measurable – by the hit rate over a large number of trials, against what pure chance would expect.
This methodological turn is Rhine's actual invention. It clearly distinguishes what he did from what the Society for Psychical Research in London had been doing since 1882 – and it forms the DNA of all later experimental work. The studies by Archie Roy and Tricia Robertson in Glasgow and the 2020 Tressoldi meta-analysis stand directly in this lineage.
The Zener cards
The tool that made Rhine famous is an apparently simple set of cards. His Duke colleague, the perception psychologist Karl Zener, designed a deck of 25 cards with five symbols: circle, square, three vertical wavy lines, cross, five-pointed star. Each symbol appears five times.
A test person (the "sender") looks at a card and tries to convey the symbol to a "receiver" who cannot see the cards. Pure chance expects 5 hits in 25 trials (20 %). Even small but consistent deviations upwards – say 7 or 8 hits per run over thousands of trials – yield statistically enormous significance.
The Zener cards have their own cultural afterlife – Bill Murray holds them in Ghostbusters, the symbol set is today an instant signifier. But they were first a serious research instrument: the first standardised stimulus material of experimental psi research.
The Pearce-Pratt experiment, 1933/34
The most famous single experiment from the Duke lab is the series with Hubert Pearce, a theologically interested student, and J. G. Pratt, one of Rhine's doctoral students. Over two academic years and in four series, more than 1,800 individual guesses were made. Pratt sat in a different building on campus, Pearce in the library; they were physically completely separated. Pratt drew one card per minute and noted it face-down; Pearce wrote down his impression at the same time. Only afterwards were the protocols sealed, brought to Rhine and compared.
Pearce hit on average over 30 % instead of the expected 20 %. The statistical probability that a result of this magnitude over 1,800 trials could come about by chance lies well beyond any conventional significance threshold. The experiment was subsequently recalculated many times and checked for methodological flaws. To this day no one has produced a compelling conventional explanation.
"Extra-Sensory Perception", 1934
In April 1934 Rhine's first book appeared: Extra-Sensory Perception, published by the Boston Society for Psychic Research. It summed up 90,000 individual guesses from several years of laboratory work. From the academic specialist audience the news spilled into the wider public: the New York Times reported, magazines splashed it on covers, the Duke lab's postbox overflowed. The term ESP – "extra-sensory perception" – became a household word within a few years. The term parapsychology as a name for the experimental discipline (first used by Max Dessoir in 1889) also entered general English usage via Rhine.
"If psi exists, it must be measurable. If it is not measurable, the question is not settled – but science is measurement."
— Sense of J. B. Rhine, "Extra-Sensory Perception" 1934
The first big methodological battle (1935–1940)
With the public success came the counter-attack. Statisticians dismantled Rhine's calculations, psychologists accused him of "sensory leakage" (that receivers might pick up information through very subtle normal channels), experimental designers attacked his card-shuffling technique. In 1937 the American Psychological Association devoted a main session to the topic.
Rhine answered not with polemics but with better protocols. Shuffling became mechanical, senders were physically separated, cards were placed in opaque envelopes, results were sent in sealed envelopes to third parties. Every wave of criticism led to a wave of methodological tightening. Precisely this mechanism – criticism produces better design – is the reason that today's Windbridge studies use five layers of blinding. The standard against which they are measured goes back to Rhine and his critics.
The "Journal of Parapsychology", 1937
Because the established specialist journals were increasingly rejecting the studies, Rhine founded his own peer-reviewed journal with McDougall in 1937: the Journal of Parapsychology. It still appears today (now at the Rhine Research Center) and is the oldest continuously running scientific periodical in the field. Anyone who wants to read the original protocols of the Pearce-Pratt study or later replications will find them there.
Telekinesis: dice instead of cards
In the late 1930s Rhine extended the programme to psychokinesis (PK) – the possible action of the psyche on matter. The instrument of choice was dice. Test subjects tried to make certain numbers come up more often than chance produces them by mental concentration alone. Initial trials showed small but consistent deviations. Again the effect sizes were small – but the number of throws was large, and the statistical significance was correspondingly clear.
This PK strand is the direct prehistory of the later Pauli effect discussion and of today's micro-PK research with random number generators (in particular Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, PEAR, from 1979 onwards).
Louisa Rhine and the spontaneous cases
While J. B. Rhine ran the laboratory, his wife Louisa E. Rhine built up the other leg of the work in parallel: a systematic collection of spontaneous reports. Thousands of people wrote to the Duke lab and described premonitions, death-bed apparitions, telepathic impressions. Louisa Rhine coded and classified some 14,000 of these reports over decades. Her book Hidden Channels of the Mind (1961) is today one of the most important qualitative sources on the phenomenology of spontaneous psi experiences.
Together, the two strands – the laboratory and the field data – produced what experimental researchers today call "converging evidence".
From the laboratory to the Rhine Research Center
In 1965 Rhine officially retired. Since Duke University was not willing to continue the laboratory, in 1962 he had presciently founded the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man (FRNM) – an independent institution with its own building in Durham, immediately adjacent to the university. It became, in 1995, the present-day Rhine Research Center. It is one of the few institutions worldwide that has been working experimentally on the subject without interruption since 1930.
Rhine died on 20 February 1980 in Hillsborough, North Carolina, aged 84.
What remains
- The methodological turn. Before Rhine, psi was a matter of anecdote and séance protocol. After Rhine, it is a matter of study design, statistics and blinding. The entire modern field – from the Glasgow studies through Schwartz/VERITAS to Beischel/Windbridge – works methodologically in his lineage.
- Stargate and the state programmes. When the CIA and the DIA built their remote viewing programme in the 1970s, they drew on Rhine's methodology. Also in the parallel programmes of other countries Rhine is the common methodological reference point.
- Pauli, Jung, synchronicity.Wolfgang Pauli discussed in his correspondence with C. G. Jung whether Rhine's results could be made intelligible through quantum non-locality. Rhine thereby became the empirical anchor of a purely theoretical debate.
- A discipline that doesn't disappear. Mainstream psychology marginalised parapsychology after 1980 – but it did not refute it. The effect sizes Rhine found have remained largely stable in modern meta-analyses (see the Tressoldi meta-analysis and our piece on majority vs. expert opinion).
Rhine himself never claimed to know what psi is. He claimed that something exists that can be measured, and that science has a duty to take this seriously. Precisely this sober, methodologically clean approach is why the Duke school still continues today.
Sources
- J. B. Rhine: Extra-Sensory Perception. Boston Society for Psychic Research, 1934.
- J. B. Rhine: New Frontiers of the Mind. The Story of the Duke Experiments. Farrar & Rinehart, New York 1937.
- J. B. Rhine & J. G. Pratt: Parapsychology. Frontier Science of the Mind. Charles C. Thomas, Springfield 1957.
- Louisa E. Rhine: Hidden Channels of the Mind. Sloane, New York 1961.
- Seymour H. Mauskopf & Michael R. McVaugh: The Elusive Science. Origins of Experimental Psychical Research. Johns Hopkins University Press 1980.
- Stacy Horn: Unbelievable. Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telekinesis, and Other Unseen Phenomena from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory. HarperCollins, New York 2009.
- Journal of Parapsychology (since 1937, ongoing) – archive at the Rhine Research Center (rhine.org).