Duke Parapsychology Laboratory

Joseph Banks Rhine and his wife Louisa Rhine arrived at Duke University in 1927 at the invitation of the psychologist William McDougall, who had just become chair of Duke's psychology department and wanted to bring a program of experimental research on unorthodox mental phenomena into a mainstream university setting, a deliberate departure from the case collecting and mediumship investigation that had dominated psychical research until then.

Working initially within McDougall's department, Rhine began systematic card guessing experiments in 1930 using a specially designed deck of five symbols, later known as Zener cards, asking subjects to guess the order of shuffled cards under controlled conditions and comparing the results against chance expectation using formal statistics. The program formally took the name Parapsychology Laboratory in 1935, giving Rhine's research group its own institutional identity within Duke while McDougall continued to chair the parent department until his death in 1938.

Rhine's 1934 book Extra-Sensory Perception, published just before the laboratory took its name, argued that his results showed statistically significant evidence for telepathy and clairvoyance that could not be explained by chance, and made both Rhine and Duke's program the most publicly recognized center of parapsychological research in the world for the next three decades.

Rhine's methods drew sustained criticism from the outset. Statisticians largely accepted his mathematics, but experimental psychologists raised concerns about card handling, subject cueing and selective reporting of successful series, and some published failures to replicate his card guessing results outside Duke. Rhine responded by tightening experimental controls, introducing machine shuffling and screened card boxes, and by the 1940s the laboratory had shifted much attention from card guessing to dice throwing experiments intended to test psychokinesis, the purported ability of intention to influence a physical process.

The laboratory trained a generation of researchers, including Louisa Rhine, who built an extensive archive of spontaneous case reports alongside the laboratory's controlled experiments, and it published the peer reviewed Journal of Parapsychology from 1937 onward. Rhine reached Duke's mandatory retirement age in 1965, and rather than leave the program's future to a university administration that had never fully embraced it, he arranged to take the laboratory's remaining endowment off campus, ending four decades of parapsychology as an internal part of Duke University. The independent successor body he formed that year, initially called the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, continued the laboratory's work and in 1995 took the name Rhine Research Center.