Founding as a Professional Body

By the mid 1950s Joseph Banks Rhine's parapsychology laboratory at Duke University had trained a first generation of researchers who lacked any professional body of their own, unlike psychologists or physicists, and who found it difficult to present work at general scientific meetings without dedicated peer review. Rhine convened a group of parapsychologists at Duke on 19 June 1957 to form the Parapsychological Association as a professional society modeled on other academic learned societies, with defined membership criteria, elected officers and a published constitution, rather than the broad public membership of bodies such as the Society for Psychical Research.

Unlike the SPR and ASPR, which had always welcomed lay members alongside scientists, the new Association restricted full membership to individuals holding an advanced degree and an active research or publication record in parapsychology, a deliberate attempt to professionalize the field along the lines of established scientific disciplines. The Association began holding annual conventions at which members presented and criticized one another's experimental work, distinct from the Journal of Parapsychology that Rhine's laboratory already produced. Its founding generation included many researchers then working at or trained by the Duke laboratory, giving the new society an early character closely tied to Rhine's experimental, statistical approach to extrasensory perception and psychokinesis.