PEAR's relationship with Princeton University was strained throughout its existence; university administrators and many faculty regarded the program as an embarrassment, and it operated for most of its life with minimal institutional support beyond Jahn's own standing as a respected engineer. Critics, both inside and outside parapsychology, disputed PEAR's statistical methods, particularly its practice of pooling very large numbers of trials to detect very small effect sizes, arguing that such pooling can make even tiny, mundane biases in equipment or analysis appear as a significant cumulative deviation, and noted that PEAR's effect sizes shrank as its methodology tightened over the decades. No outside laboratory replicated PEAR's reported effect to a standard the wider physics or psychology community accepted as conclusive, and a large multi-laboratory replication effort coordinated in the late 1980s and 1990s, involving PEAR and other groups, produced inconsistent results across sites.
The lab closed in February 2007 after 28 years, with Jahn stating that it had accomplished what it set out to do scientifically and that the remaining work was better pursued elsewhere; independent commentators were more direct, treating the closure as the end of the most extensive micro-PK program ever run without it having produced a widely accepted positive result. A related, still-running effort, the Global Consciousness Project, has applied similar random-generator logic to world events since 1998 and remains disputed on comparable statistical grounds.