Research On Para-psychology

In the U.S., one of the earliest groups to become active in parapsychology was the Parapsychology Laboratory of North Carolina's Duke University, which began publishing literature in the 1930s. There, under the direction of the American psychologist Joseph Banks Rhine, methods were developed that advanced psychical investigations from the correlations of isolated and often vague anecdotal reports to a mathematical study based on statistics and the laws of probability.

In the experiments dealing with ESP, Rhine and his associates used mainly a deck of 25 cards, somewhat similar to ordinary playing cards but bearing on their faces only five designs: star, circle, cross, square, and wavy lines. If a subject correctly named 5 out of the shuffled deck of 25 concealed cards, that was considered pure chance. Certain subjects, however, consistently named 6 out of 10 cards correctly; so Rhine and his associates concluded that this demonstrated the existence of ESP. In their experiments on PK, the group used ordinary dice that were thrown from a cup against a wall or tumbled in mechanically driven cages. In these tests, an apparent relationship was found between the mental effort of subjects to “will” particular faces of the dice to appear upward and the percentage of times the faces actually did so. The results obtained in many individual experiments and in the research as a whole, Rhine and his workers decided, could not reasonably be attributed to the fluctuations of chance.

Rhine retired from Duke University in 1965 and transferred his research to a privately endowed organization, the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man. Since that time parapsychology has become better established in other universities, as illustrated by the offering of credit courses in the subject in increasing numbers. In addition, independent research centers continue to be founded, among them the American Society for Psychical Research, with headquarters in New York City. The Parapsychological Association, an international group of scholars actively working in the field, was formed in 1957 and was granted affiliation status by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1969