J. B. Rhine

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In the autumn of 1922, in a hall in Chicago, a botanist and his wife sat listening to Arthur Conan Doyle make the case that the dead can speak. Joseph Banks Rhine (1895–1980) and Louisa Rhine had come not as skeptics but as people who wanted it to be true — they had lost their footing in the Methodism of their upbringing and hoped that spiritualism might supply, on something like evidence, what creed no longer supplied on faith: a reason to believe that the self outlasts the body. What they found, when they pursued it into the séance room, drove them the other way. They sat with mediums, watched the apparatus of materialization and rapping at close range, and concluded that the practitioners they observed were frauds. Rhine’s first published intervention in the field, in 1926, was an attack on the celebrated Boston medium Mina Crandon — “Margery” — whose performances he judged a deception. The disillusionment was total. But it did not extinguish the original question; it sharpened it. Stripped of the spirits, of the trumpet and the ectoplasm, a narrower and harder question remained: can the mind acquire information without the use of the senses at all? That residue — testable, in principle, where survival of death was not — became the work of his life.

From the séance room to the laboratory

Rhine took a doctorate in botany at the University of Chicago in 1925; so did Louisa, his lifelong collaborator and, later, the principal collector and analyst of spontaneous psychic experiences. Plant physiology was a training in the discipline of the controlled observation, and it is the frame Rhine carried into a subject that had until then lived almost entirely in two registers — the religious enthusiasm of the medium’s parlor and the gentlemanly case-collection of the British Society for Psychical Research. That older project, founded in 1882 around F. W. H. Myers, Frank Podmore, Henry Sidgwick, and Edmund Gurney, had assembled vast archives of crisis apparitions and death-coincidences and argued from their statistical improbability; its American sister body had drawn in William James. Myers had coined telepathy in 1882, “feeling at a distance,” to gather a scatter of older categories — mesmeric rapport, veridical dreams, Highland second sight — under one apparently scientific word. Rhine inherited that vocabulary and that ambition. What he changed was the method: he proposed to leave the spontaneous case behind entirely and to manufacture the phenomenon, if it existed, in repeatable quantity, under conditions a critic could specify in advance.

The pivot happened at Duke University. The psychologist William McDougall — a major figure in the discipline, an opponent of strict behaviorism, and a man unembarrassed by the question of mind — arrived at Duke in 1927, and Rhine followed into his orbit. By about 1930 there was a Parapsychology Laboratory, the first of its kind embedded in an American university, and Rhine had a working program. It was in this setting that he coined the term that fixed the field’s name in the public mind: extra-sensory perception, abbreviated ESP, chosen, he said, to make the faculty sound as ordinary as possible. He did not invent the word parapsychology — the German psychologist Max Dessoir had used Parapsychologie decades earlier, a debt Rhine acknowledged on the third page of his first book — but he is the figure who carried it into English as the standing name for an experimental discipline rather than a German curiosity. The naming mattered. A séance produced testimony; a perception that is extra-sensory was something one could in principle put on a bench and measure.

The Zener deck and the arithmetic of guessing

The instrument was disarmingly plain. With his colleague Karl Zener, a perceptual psychologist, Rhine settled on a deck of twenty-five cards bearing five symbols repeated five times each: a hollow circle, a cross, a set of three wavy lines, a square, and a five-pointed star — shapes chosen to be sharply distinct and emotionally neutral, so that a guess carried no preference to bias it. The procedure was simple to state. A subject, unable to see the cards, would try to name each one as it was drawn from a shuffled deck. Pure chance predicts five correct out of twenty-five — one in five. The whole evidential weight of the program rested on a single inference: that scores running consistently above five-in-twenty-five, sustained across long runs and many sitters, point to a channel of information the senses cannot account for. A single lucky run proves nothing; the claim was statistical, cumulative, and framed in the language of probability rather than of marvels. By 1934 the laboratory had logged well over ninety thousand individual trials.

This was the methodological hinge — the conscious importation of divinatory and second-sight phenomena out of the register of omen and testimony and into the register of the significance test. Where mesmerism and the rapport of Franz Anton Mesmer’s somnambules had been demonstrated by spectacle, and where the Victorians had argued from the sheer unlikelihood of a coincidence, Rhine argued from a deviation in a number. The most celebrated runs came from a few high-scoring subjects, above all the divinity student Hubert Pearce, whose distance trials with the researcher J. G. Pratt — the “Pearce–Pratt series” — produced rates the laboratory held to be astronomically improbable on chance alone. Rhine’s 1934 monograph, Extra-Sensory Perception, published by the Boston Society for Psychic Research, reported these results and concluded that ESP was an actual and demonstrable occurrence. Three years later the popular book New Frontiers of the Mind (1937) — a Book-of-the-Month Club selection — carried the claim out of the laboratory and into the national imagination, and in the same year Rhine founded, with McDougall, the Journal of Parapsychology, giving the field its own peer-reviewed organ at a moment when no mainstream journal would reliably house it.

Dice, and the question of mind over matter

The receptive side of the work — ESP, the mind taking in information — had a twin in the expressive side: the claim that mind can act outward upon matter. The story Rhine told was that a gambler visited the laboratory in 1934 insisting he could will the fall of dice, and that the claim was, like the rest, testable. For the effect Rhine adopted the word psychokinesis — abbreviated PK, a term the publisher Henry Holt had coined back in 1914 — in preference to the older telekinesis, which still carried the odor of the séance and named only visible object-movement. Psychokinesis was deliberately broader: the influence of mind on a physical system not explicable by any known energy, a definition wide enough to cover both the levitating table and an imperceptible statistical lean on falling cubes — and therefore, crucially, wide enough to be tested with the same probability arithmetic as the cards. Subjects tried to make dice land on chosen faces; the controls tightened over the years from hand-throwing to mechanical cups to automatic tumblers, with the target faces systematically rotated to cancel any bias in the dice themselves. Because the ESP work was already under heavy fire, Rhine withheld the dice results for nearly a decade, publishing the first PK paper only in 1943, with Louisa Rhine as co-author. He popularized the whole reach of the program in The Reach of the Mind (1947).

Rhine’s own commitments were cautious in form and large in implication. He presented ESP and psychokinesis as empirical findings, not as doctrine — not articles of a creed but readings off an instrument. Yet he understood perfectly what they would mean if they held. If a mind could read a card it could not see, or tilt a die it did not touch, then mind was not, after all, fully reducible to the physical brain and its sensory channels — and the materialism that had quietly become the default metaphysics of the sciences had closed a question it had no right to close. He thought the laboratory, not the pulpit, was the place to reopen it. That ambition placed him at a peculiar crossing point: heir to the survival-hunting hopes that had drawn him to Conan Doyle, but pursuing them with the apparatus of the very materialist science whose sufficiency he doubted.

The dispute that became the legacy

The work drew immediate and lasting criticism, and the disputes are now part of what Rhine is remembered for — inseparable from the findings, because the findings were never granted. Psychologists and statisticians questioned his probability models, the adequacy of his controls against sensory leakage (could a subject glimpse a card’s back, or read an experimenter’s involuntary cue?), the possibility of recording and scoring errors, and, most damagingly over time, the difficulty other laboratories had in reproducing his figures. One strand of the early attack — the charge that his mathematics were simply wrong — was met, and the meeting is precise enough to be worth stating exactly. In 1937 the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, through its president Burton H. Camp, declared that Rhine’s statistical methods were valid, and that if there were anything wrong with the experiments it would have to be sought in their conditions, not in their arithmetic. This is routinely misremembered as a scientific endorsement of ESP. It was nothing of the kind: it certified the statistics as statistics and explicitly left the experimental question open. The fight simply moved from the calculation to the bench.

There it stayed. Defenders answered each objection in turn, tightened the protocols — opaque screens, shuffled and machine-handled decks, separated rooms, automated recording — and pressed on; critics held that the central effect never survived genuinely independent, well-controlled replication, and that the largest, most-cited scores belonged to a handful of star subjects whose performance faded under scrutiny. The deeper wound was structural. A later generation of the broader receptive-psi research program supplied two emblems of its vulnerability that bore directly back on Rhine’s method. S. G. Soal’s card-guessing results, long considered the field’s strongest, were shown in 1978 — by Betty Markwick, working from inside the SPR — to have been manufactured by inserting digits into the target columns. And the long argument over replication that began with Rhine’s decks ran forward, through the ganzfeld experiments of the later twentieth century, into psychology’s own replication crisis — the recognition that optional stopping, selective publication, and the file-drawer problem can manufacture a small significant signal out of noise. The questions Rhine’s critics raised about a deviation in a number turned out to be questions the whole of experimental psychology would eventually have to ask of itself.

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 a settled result either way.

After Duke: the independent institute

Mainstream science never admitted the discipline Rhine named, and Duke’s own psychology department kept the laboratory at arm’s length almost from the start. Rhine answered by building the field its own institutions outside the university’s protection. In 1962, with funding from Chester Carlson — the inventor of xerography, whose Xerox fortune underwrote a good deal of mid-century American parapsychology — he established the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man (FRNM). When he retired from Duke in 1965 he moved the work off campus entirely, and the Foundation, with its Institute for Parapsychology and its Parapsychology Press, became the designated heir of the Duke laboratory’s records and its program. The body survives in Durham; in 1995 it was renamed the Rhine Research Center, and it remains, decades after his death in 1980, the institutional shadow he cast.

Sources, scholarship, and the primary record

The standard scholarly history of the moment Rhine made is Seymour Mauskopf and Michael McVaugh’s The Elusive Science: Origins of Experimental Psychical Research (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), which concentrates on the 1920–1940 period when psychical research strained for the acceptance of mainstream science, draws on the records of the British and American Societies for Psychical Research and of Rhine’s own laboratory, and closes with an afterword by J. B. and Louisa Rhine themselves; the full cataloguing record is held at the Wellcome Collection, and the book’s standing in the field can be read from its review in The American Historical Review. The 1937 statistical détente — the Institute of Mathematical Statistics declining to fault Rhine’s arithmetic while leaving the experimental question open — was reported contemporaneously, including in a 1938 Harvard Crimson account quoting Burton Camp’s distinction between the experimental and the mathematical sides of the work. The material culture of the program — the twenty-five-card Zener deck and the arithmetic of guessing built on it — is treated in the American Psychological Association’s Monitor.

Rhine’s own books — Extra-Sensory Perception (1934), New Frontiers of the Mind (1937), and The Reach of the Mind (1947) — remain under copyright in the United States and are not yet free for hosting; the 1934 monograph is scheduled to enter the public domain under the ninety-five-year rule, with the later titles following in turn. The deeper roots of the questions he reformulated — the Victorian psychical research of Myers and Podmore, the spiritualist movement he came in through and turned against, and the older folk and contemplative categories of second sight and telepathy — are documented in their own right, and the bibliographic and copyright detail for the primary corpus lives there.

What Rhine 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.

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