J. B. Rhine’s Duke University ESP experiments

Record summary

Joseph Banks Rhine and colleagues at Duke University developed card-guessing and related experiments to study alleged extrasensory perception, using standardized symbols, repeated trials and statistical analysis. Their work helped institutionalize parapsychology as a laboratory-oriented field in the United States and became influential in occult, spiritualist and skeptical debates. The lead is valuable for comparing experimental design with séance traditions. Uncertainty concerns replication, sensory leakage, optional stopping, statistical assumptions and later assessments of the original protocols.