Parapsychology
Parapsychology is the study of alleged psychic phenomena and other paranormal claims, for example, those related to near-death experiences, synchronicity, apparitional experiences, etc. Criticized as being a pseudoscience, the majority of mainstream scientists reject it. Parapsychology has been criticized for continuing investigation despite being unable to provide reproducible evidence for the existence of any psychic phenomena after more than a century of research.
Parapsychology research rarely appears in mainstream scientific journals; a few niche journals publish most papers about parapsychology.
Terminology
The term parapsychology was coined in 1889 by philosopher Max Dessoir as the German parapsychologie. It was adopted by J. B. Rhine in the 1930s as a replacement for the term psychical research to indicate a significant shift toward experimental methodology and academic discipline. The term originates from the meaning "alongside", and psychology.In parapsychology, psi is the unknown factor in extrasensory perception and psychokinesis experiences that is not explained by known physical or biological mechanisms. The term is derived from ψ psi, the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet and the initial letter of the psyche, "mind, soul". The term was coined by biologist Bertold Wiesner, and first used by psychologist Robert Thouless in a 1942 article published in the British Journal of Psychology.
The Parapsychological Association divides psi into two main categories: psi-gamma for extrasensory perception and psi-kappa for psychokinesis. In popular culture, "psi" has become more and more synonymous with extraordinary psychic, mental, and "psionic" abilities and powers.
History
Early psychical research
In 1853, chemist Robert Hare conducted experiments with mediums and reported positive results. Other researchers such as Frank Podmore highlighted flaws in his experiments, such as lack of controls to prevent trickery. Agenor de Gasparin conducted early experiments into table-tipping. For five months in 1853, he declared the experiments a success, being the result of an "ectenic force". Critics noted that the conditions were insufficient to prevent trickery. For example, the sitters may have moved the table with their knees, and no experimenter was simultaneously watching above and below the table.The German astrophysicist Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner tested the medium Henry Slade in 1877. According to Zöllner, some of the experiments were successful. However, flaws in the experiments were discovered, and critics have suggested that Slade was a fraud who performed trickery in the experiments.
The Society for Psychical Research was founded in London in 1882. Its formation was the first systematic effort to organize scientists and scholars to investigate paranormal phenomena. Early membership included philosophers, scholars, scientists, educators and politicians, such as Henry Sidgwick, Arthur Balfour, William Crookes, Rufus Osgood Mason, and Nobel Laureate Charles Richet. Presidents of the Society included, in addition to Richet, Eleanor Sidgwick and William James, and subsequently Nobel Laureates Henri Bergson and Lord Rayleigh, and philosopher C. D. Broad.
Areas of study included telepathy, hypnotism, Reichenbach's phenomena, apparitions, hauntings, and the physical aspects of Spiritualism such as table-tilting, materialization, and apportation. In the 1880s, the Society investigated apparitional experiences and hallucinations in the sane. Among the first important works was the two-volume publication in 1886, Phantasms of the Living, which was largely criticized by scholars. In 1894, the Census of Hallucinations was published which sampled 17,000 people. Out of these, 1,684 persons admitted to having experienced a hallucination of an apparition. The SPR became the model for similar societies in other European countries and the United States during the late 19th century.
Early clairvoyance experiments were reported in 1884 by Charles Richet. Playing cards were enclosed in envelopes, and a subject was put under hypnosis to identify them. The subject was reported to have succeeded in a series of 133 trials, but the results dropped to the chance level when performed before a group of scientists in Cambridge. J. M. Peirce and E. C. Pickering reported a similar experiment in which they tested 36 subjects over 23,384 trials, which did not obtain above-chance scores.
In 1881, Eleanor Sidgwick revealed the fraudulent methods that spirit photographers such as Édouard Isidore Buguet, Frederic Hudson, and William H. Mumler had utilized. During the late nineteenth century, many fraudulent mediums were exposed by SPR investigators.
Largely due to the support of psychologist William James, the American Society for Psychical Research opened its doors in Boston in 1885, moving to New York City in 1905 under the leadership of James H. Hyslop. Notable cases investigated by Walter Franklin Prince of the ASPR in the early 20th century included Pierre L. O. A. Keeler, the Great Amherst Mystery and Patience Worth.
Rhine era
In 1911, Stanford University became the first academic institution in the United States to study extrasensory perception and psychokinesis in a laboratory setting. The effort was headed by psychologist John Edgar Coover and funded by Thomas Welton Stanford, brother of the university's founder. After conducting approximately 10,000 experiments, Coover concluded that "statistical treatments of the data fail to reveal any cause beyond chance."In 1930, Duke University became the second major U.S. academic institution to engage in the critical study of ESP and psychokinesis in the laboratory. Under the guidance of psychologist William McDougall, and with the help of others in the department—including psychologists Karl Zener, Joseph B. Rhine, and Louisa E. Rhine—laboratory ESP experiments using volunteer subjects from the undergraduate student body began. As opposed to the approaches of psychical research, which generally sought qualitative evidence for paranormal phenomena, the experiments at Duke University proffered a quantitative, statistical approach using cards and dice. As a consequence of the ESP experiments at Duke, standard laboratory procedures for the testing of ESP were developed and adopted by interested researchers worldwide.
George Estabrooks conducted an ESP experiment using cards in 1927. Harvard students were used as the subjects. Estabrooks acted as the sender, with the guesser in an adjoining room. Estabrooks conducted a total of 2,300 trials. When Estabrooks sent the subjects to a distant room with insulation, the scores dropped to chance level. Attempts to repeat the experiment also failed.
The publication of J. B. Rhine's book, New Frontiers of the Mind, brought the laboratory's findings to the general public. In his book, Rhine popularized the word "parapsychology", coined by psychologist Max Dessoir over 40 years earlier, to describe the research conducted at Duke. Rhine also founded an autonomous Parapsychology Laboratory within Duke and started the Journal of Parapsychology, which he co-edited with McDougall.
File:Zener cards.svg|thumb|right|upright=1.25|Early parapsychological research employed the use of Zener cards in experiments designed to test for the existence of telepathic communication, or clairvoyant or precognitive perception.
Rhine, along with associate Karl Zener, had developed a statistical system of testing for ESP that involved subjects guessing what symbol, out of five possible symbols, would appear when going through a special deck of cards designed for this purpose. A percentage of correct guesses significantly above 20% was perceived as higher than chance and indicative of psychic ability. Rhine stated in his first book, Extrasensory Perception, that after 90,000 trials, he felt ESP is "an actual and demonstrable occurrence".
Irish medium and parapsychologist Eileen J. Garrett was tested by Rhine at Duke University in 1933 with Zener cards. Rhine placed certain symbols on the cards, sealed them in an envelope, and asked Garrett to guess their contents. She performed poorly and later criticized the tests by claiming the cards lacked a psychic energy called "energy stimulus" and that she could not perform clairvoyance to order. The parapsychologist Samuel Soal and his colleagues tested Garrett in May 1937. Soal conducted most experiments in the Psychological Laboratory at University College London. Soal recorded over 12,000 guesses, but Garrett failed to produce above chance level. In his report Soal wrote "In the case of Mrs. Eileen Garrett we fail to find the slightest confirmation of J. B. Rhine's remarkable claims relating to her alleged powers of extra-sensory perception. Not only did she fail when I took charge of the experiments, but she failed equally when four other carefully trained experimenters took my place."
The parapsychology experiments at Duke evoked much criticism from academics and others who challenged the concepts and evidence of ESP. Many psychological departments attempted to repeat Rhine's experiments with failure. W. S. Cox from Princeton University, with 132 subjects, produced 25,064 trials in a playing card ESP experiment. Cox concluded, "There is no evidence of extrasensory perception either in the 'average man' or of the group investigated or in any particular individual of that group. The discrepancy between these results and those obtained by Rhine is due either to uncontrollable factors in experimental procedure or to the difference in the subjects." Four other psychological departments failed to replicate Rhine's results. After thousands of card runs, James Charles Crumbaugh failed to duplicate the results of Rhine.
In 1938, the psychologist Joseph Jastrow wrote that much of the evidence for extrasensory perception collected by Rhine and other parapsychologists was anecdotal, biased, dubious and the result of "faulty observation and familiar human frailties". Rhine's experiments were discredited due to the discovery that sensory leakage or cheating could account for all his results, such as the subject being able to read the symbols from the back of the cards and being able to see and hear the experimenter to note subtle clues.
Illusionist Milbourne Christopher wrote years later that he felt "there are at least a dozen ways a subject who wished to cheat under the conditions Rhine described could deceive the investigator". When Rhine took precautions in response to criticisms of his methods, he failed to find any high-scoring subjects. Another criticism, made by chemist Irving Langmuir, among others, was one of selective reporting. Langmuir stated that Rhine did not report scores of subjects that he suspected were intentionally guessing wrong and that this, he felt, biased the statistical results higher than they should have been.
Rhine and his colleagues attempted to address these criticisms through new experiments described in the book Extrasensory Perception After Sixty Years. Rhine described three experiments: the Pearce-Pratt experiment, the Pratt-Woodruff experiment, and the Ownbey-Zirkle series, which he believed demonstrated ESP. However, C. E. M. Hansel wrote, "It is now known that each experiment contained serious flaws that escaped notice in the examination made by the authors of Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years". Joseph Gaither Pratt was the co-experimenter in the Pearce-Pratt and Pratt-Woodruff experiments at the Duke campus. Hansel visited the campus where the experiments took place and discovered the results could have originated through a trick, so they could not supply evidence for ESP.
In 1957, Rhine and Joseph Gaither Pratt wrote Parapsychology: Frontier Science of the Mind. Because of the methodological problems, parapsychologists no longer utilize card-guessing studies. Rhine's experiments into psychokinesis were also criticized. John Sladek wrote:
His research used dice, with subjects 'willing' them to fall a certain way. Not only can dice be drilled, shaved, falsely numbered and manipulated, but even straight dice often show bias in the long run. Casinos for this reason retire dice often, but at Duke, subjects continued to try for the same effect on the same dice over long experimental runs. Not surprisingly, PK appeared at Duke and nowhere else.
Parapsychologists and skeptics criticized the Ownbey-Zirkle ESP experiment at Duke. Ownbey would attempt to send ESP symbols to Zirkle, who would guess what they were. The pair were placed in adjacent rooms, unable to see each other, and an electric fan was used to prevent the pair from communicating by sensory cues. Ownbey tapped a telegraph key to Zirkle to inform him when she was trying to send him a symbol. The door separating the two rooms was open during the experiment, and after each guess, Zirkle would call out his guess to Ownbey, who recorded his choice. Critics pointed out the experiment was flawed as Ownbey acted as both the sender and the experimenter; nobody controlled the experiment, so Ownbey could have cheated by communicating with Zirkle or made recording mistakes.
The Turner-Ownbey long-distance telepathy experiment was also flawed. May Frances Turner positioned herself in the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory, while Sara Ownbey claimed to receive transmissions 250 miles away. For the experiment, Turner would think of a symbol and write it down, while Ownbey would write her guesses. The scores were highly successful and both records were supposed to be sent to J. B. Rhine, however, Ownbey sent them to Turner. Critics pointed out this invalidated the results as she could have simply written her own record to agree with the other. When the experiment was repeated and the records were sent to Rhine, the scores dropped to average.
Lucien Warner and Mildred Raible performed a famous ESP experiment at Duke University. Warner and Raible locked a subject in a room with a switch controlling a signal light elsewhere, which she could signal to guess the card. Ten runs with ESP packs of cards were used, and she achieved 93 hits. Weaknesses with the experiment were later discovered. The duration of the light signal could be varied so that the subject could call for specific symbols. Certain symbols in the experiment appeared far more often than others, indicating poor shuffling or card manipulation. The experiment was not repeated.
Duke's administration grew less sympathetic to parapsychology, and after Rhine's retirement in 1965, parapsychological links with the university were broken. Rhine later established the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man and the Institute for Parapsychology as a successor to the Duke laboratory. In 1995, the centenary of Rhine's birth, the FRNM was renamed the Rhine Research Center. Today, the Rhine Research Center is a parapsychology research unit, stating that it "aims to improve the human condition by creating a scientific understanding of those abilities and sensitivities that appear to transcend the ordinary limits of space and time".