Joseph Banks Rhine (September 29, 1895 – February 20, 1980), usually known as J. B. Rhine, was an American botanist who founded parapsychology as a branch of psychology, founding the parapsychology lab at Duke University, the Journal of Parapsychology, the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, and the Parapsychological Association. Rhine wrote the books Extrasensory Perception and Parapsychology: Frontier Science of the Mind.
Early life and education Rhine was the second of five children born to Samuel Ellis Rhine and Elizabeth Vaughan Rhine in Waterloo, Juniata County, Pennsylvania. Samuel Rhine had been educated in a Harrisburg business college, had taught school and later had been a farmer and merchant. The family moved to Marshallville, Ohio, when Joseph was in his early teens.Denis, Brian. (1982). The Enchanted Voyager. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice–Hall
Rhine was educated at Ohio Northern University and the College of Wooster, after which he enlisted in the Marine Corps and was stationed in Santiago. Afterwards, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he received his master's degree in botany in 1923 and a PhD in botany in 1925.Joseph Banks Rhine: 1895–1980 American Journal of Psychology, December 1981, Vol. 94, No. 4, pp. 649–653. While there, he and his wife Louisa E. Rhine were impressed by a May 1922 lecture given by Arthur Conan Doyle exulting the scientific proof of communication with the dead. Rhine later wrote, "This mere possibility was the most exhilarating thought I had had in years."Joseph Rinn. (1950). Sixty Years of Psychical Research: Houdini and I Among the Spirits. Truth Seeker Company. Rhine's interest in this topic was furthered after reading The Survival of Man, Oliver Lodge's book about mediumship and life after death.
Rhine taught for a year at Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, in Yonkers, New York,. Afterwards, he enrolled in the psychology department at Harvard University to study for a year with Professor William McDougall. In 1927, he moved to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina to work under Professor McDougall. Rhine began the studies that helped develop parapsychology into a branch of science; he looked at parapsychology as a branch of "abnormal psychology."
Observing fraudulent medium Rhine lent an insight into the medium Mina Crandon's performances. He was able to observe some of her trickery in the dark when she used luminous objects.Thomas Tietze. (1973). Margery. Harper & Row. Rhine observed Crandon in fraud in a séance in 1926. According to Rhine, during the séance she was free from control and kicked a megaphone to give the impression it was levitating.Massimo Polidoro. (2001). Final Séance: The Strange Friendship Between Houdini and Conan Doyle. Prometheus Books. pp. 134-234.
Rhine’s report that documented the fraud was refused by the American Society for Psychical Research, so he published it in the Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology. In response, defenders of Crandon attacked Rhine. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a letter to the Boston Herald attacking Rhine's "colossal impertinence...stupidity and malignancy."
Rhine wondered why J. Malcolm Bird, with three years of experience, did not expose any of her tricks. Rhine suspected that Bird was a confederate of the medium.
ESP research
Rhine tested many students as volunteer subjects in his research project. His first exceptional subject in this Extrasensory Perception (ESP) research was Adam Linzmayer, an economics undergraduate at Duke. In 1931, Linzmayer scored very highly in preliminary Zener card tests that Rhine ran him through; initially, he scored 100% correct on two short (nine-card series) tests that Rhine gave him. Even in his first long test (a 300-card series), Linzmayer scored 39.6% correct scores, when chance would have been only 20%. He consecutively scored 36% each time on three 25-card series (chance being 20%). However, over time, Linzmayer's scores began to drop down much closer to (but still above) chance averages. Boredom, distraction, and competing obligations, on Linzmayer's part, were conjectured as possible factors bearing on the declining test results. Linzmayer's epic run of naming 21 out of 25 took place in Rhine's car.
The following year, Rhine tested another promising individual, Hubert Pearce, who managed to surpass Linzmayer's overall 1931 performance. (Pearce's average during the period he was tested in 1932 was 40%, whereas chance would have been 20%.) However, Pearce was actually allowed to handle the cards most of the time. He shuffled and cut them.
The most famous series of experiments from Rhine's laboratory is arguably the ESP tests involving Hubert Pearce and Joseph Gaither Pratt, a research assistant. Pearce was tested (using Zener cards) by Pratt, who shuffled and recorded the order of the cards in the parapsychology lab 100 yards from where Pearce was sitting in a campus library cubicle. The series comprised 37 25-trial runs, conducted between August 1933 and March 1934. From run to run, the number of matches between Pratt's cards and Pearce's guesses was highly variable, generally deviating significantly above chance but also falling dramatically below chance. These scores were obtained irrespective of the distance between Pratt and Pearce, which was arranged as either 100 or 250 yards.
In 1934, drawing upon several years of meticulous lab research and statistical analysis, Rhine published the first edition of a book titled Extra-Sensory Perception, which in various editions was widely read over the next decades.W. Edward Craighead and Charles B. Nemeroff (2001). "Rhine, Joseph Banks" in The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science, John Wiley, p. 1411. In the later 1930s, Rhine investigated "psychokinesis" – again reducing the subject to simple terms so that it could be tested, with controls, in a laboratory setting. Rhine relied on testing whether a subject could influence the outcome of tossed dice – initially with hand-thrown dice, later with dice thrown from a cup, and finally with machine-thrown dice.
In 1940 Rhine co-authored with Joseph Gaither Pratt and other associates at Duke Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years, a review of all experimental studies of clairvoyance and telepathy. It has been recognized as the first meta-analysis in the history of science.Bösch, H. (2004). Reanalyzing a meta-analysis on extra-sensory perception dating from 1940, the first comprehensive meta-analysis in the history of science. In S. Schmidt (Ed.), Proceedings of the 47th Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association, University of Vienna, (pp. 1–13). During the war years, Rhine lost most of his male staff members to war work or the military. This caused something of a hiatus in new research, but the opportunity was taken to publish the large backlog of experiments conducted since the early 1930s on psychokinesis. After the war, he had occasion to study some dramatic cases outside the lab.
Rhine's wife, Louisa E. Rhine, pursued work that complemented her husband's in the later 1940s, gathering information on spontaneous ESP reports (experiences people had, outside of a laboratory setting). Yet Rhine believed that a good groundwork should be laid in the lab, so that the scientific community might take parapsychology seriously. In the early 1960s, Rhine left Duke and founded the Institute for Parapsychology, which later became the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man.
Legacy Rhine, along with William McDougall, introduced the term "parapsychology" (translating a German term coined by Max Dessoir). It is sometimes said that Rhine almost single-handedly developed a methodology and concepts for parapsychology as a form of experimental psychology. But however great his contributions, some earlier work along similar — analytical and statistical — lines had been undertaken sporadically in Europe, notably the experimental work of Oliver Lodge.Mauskopf, S. H./McVaugh, M. R. (1980). The Elusive Science: Origins of Experimental Psychical Research. Baltimore, ML, US: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Rhine founded the institutions necessary for parapsychology's continuing professionalization in the U.S. — including the establishment of the Journal of Parapsychology and the formation of the Parapsychological Association,W. Edward Craighead and Charles B. Nemeroff (2001). "Rhine, Joseph Banks" in The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science, John Wiley, p. 1412. and also the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man (FRNM), a precursor to what is today known as the Rhine Research Center.
He also had a huge influence on science fiction after John W. Campbell became obsessed with his theories about psionic powers and ideas about future human evolution.Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy : “Fans Are Slans”: A Study in Campbellian Influence
Reception Rhine's results have never been duplicated by the scientific community.C. E. M. Hansel. (1980). ESP and Parapsychology: A Critical Re-evaluation. Prometheus Books. pp. 86-122. Terence Hines. (2003). Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Prometheus Books. p. 122. "The procedural errors in the Rhine experiments have been extremely damaging to his claims to have demonstrated the existence of ESP. Equally damaging has been the fact that the results have not replicated when the experiments have been conducted in other laboratories."
A number of psychological departments attempted to repeat Rhine's experiments but failed. W. S. Cox (1936) from Princeton University with 132 subjects produced 25,064 trials in a playing-card ESP experiment.Cox, W. S. (1936). An Experiment in ESP. Journal of Experimental Psychology 12: 437. 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.Joseph Jastrow. (1938). ESP, House of Cards. The American Scholar. Vol. 8, No. 1. pp. 13-22. "Rhine’s results fail to be confirmed. At Colgate University (40, 000 tests, 7 subjects), at Chicago (extensive series on 315 students), at Southern Methodist College (75, 000 tests), at Glasgow, Scotland (6, 650 tests), at London University (105, 000 tests), not a single individual was found who under rigidly conducted experiments could score above chance. At Stanford University it has been convincingly shown that the conditions favorable to the intrusion of subtle errors produce above-chance records which come down to chance when sources of error are eliminated."Cited in C. E. M. Hansel The Search for a Demonstration of ESP. In Paul Kurtz. (1985). A Skeptic's Handbook of Parapsychology. Prometheus Books. pp. 105–127; Adam, E.T. (1938). A summary of some negative experiments. Journal of Parapsychology 2: 232–236. Crumbaugh, J.C. (1938). An experimental study of extra-sensory perception. Masters thesis. Southern Methodist University. Heinlein, C.P; Heinlein, J. H. (1938). Critique of the premises of statistical methodology of parapsychology. Journal of Parapsychology 5: 135-148. Willoughby, R.R. (1938). Further card-guessing experiments. Journal of Psychology 18: 3–13.
The American psychologist James Charles Crumbaugh attempted to repeat Rhine's findings over a long period without success. Crumbaugh wrote: