Tags: People Parapsychology Morgue
J.B. Rhine was the founder of a research program that became the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University; the lab continues to operate independently off campus as the Rhine Research Center.
Rhine pioneered a number of common protocols for testing psychical activities including Zener card tests for extrasensory perception. He also studied psychokinesis and remote viewing. Rhine claimed to have found statistically significant evidence of psychical abilities including ESP and psychokinesis. For example, whereas a Zener card test should produce a 20% hit rate based on simple guesswork, some of Rhine's subjects managed 25% or higher. Similarly, Rhine observed that some participants in psychokinesis experiments involving dice outperformed random chance. However, his results have been met with skepticism from the mainstream scientific community and have not been duplicated by credible scientific authorities.
- Horowitz 2022 claims that Rhine's studies were carried out with the utmost scientific rigour and that his results have been reproduced; however, he only cites other parapsychologists.
Among Rhine's works was his 1940 book Extra-Sensory Perception After 60 Years, often cited as the first meta-analysis in the history of science.