J. B. Rhine

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Joseph Banks Rhine (1895–1980) was the American researcher who tried to drag the study of the paranormal out of the séance room and into the laboratory, and whose statistics-driven card experiments at Duke University gave twentieth-century parapsychology its first claim to scientific method. Trained as a botanist, he came to the subject by way of disappointment: he and his wife, Louisa Rhine, had hoped that spiritualism might offer evidence of survival after death, attended séances, and concluded that the mediums they saw were frauds. What remained was a narrower, testable question — whether the mind can acquire information without the senses at all.

At Duke from the late 1920s, under the psychologist William McDougall, Rhine turned that question into a procedure. He coined the term extra-sensory perception, abbreviated it to ESP, and popularized parapsychology as the name for the field. His instrument was a deck of twenty-five cards bearing five plain symbols — circle, cross, wavy lines, square, star — devised with his colleague Karl Zener. A subject would try to name cards drawn from a shuffled deck; chance predicted five correct in twenty-five, and Rhine argued that scores running consistently above chance, across long runs, pointed to something the senses could not explain. His 1934 monograph Extra-Sensory Perception reported such results, and the 1937 popular book New Frontiers of the Mind carried them to a wide audience.

The work drew immediate and lasting criticism, and the disputes are part of what Rhine is now remembered for. Psychologists and statisticians questioned his probability models, the adequacy of his controls against sensory leakage and recording errors, and the difficulty other laboratories had in reproducing his figures. Defenders answered each objection in turn, tightened the protocols, and pressed on; critics held that the central effect never survived rigorous replication. That standoff did not resolve in Rhine’s lifetime, and historians of science generally treat his program as a case study in how a contested claim is tested rather than as settled result either way.

Rhine’s own commitments were cautious in form and large in implication. He presented ESP, and later psychokinesis — the supposed influence of mind on matter, which he tested with dice-rolling trials — as empirical findings, not as doctrine; yet he understood them to bear on whether mind is reducible to the physical, a question he thought materialism had closed too soon. He founded the Journal of Parapsychology in 1937 and, after leaving Duke, established an independent research institute to continue the work outside the university. Mainstream science never admitted the field he named, and the replication problem he met has only sharpened in the decades since. What he left was less a body of accepted knowledge than a method and a vocabulary: the laboratory framing within which claims about the paranormal could be stated precisely enough to be argued over.