Psychologist and parapsychologist, born in Juniata Co, Pennsylvania, USA. After taking his PhD in botany at the University of Chicago, he studied under William McDougall at Duke University, where he became professor of psychology (1937). He co-founded the Parapsychology Laboratory there (1930) and the Institute of Parapsychology in Durham, NC (1964), and is generally recognized as the founder of modern studies of psychical phenomena. His experiments involving packs of specially designed cards used by subjects in different rooms established the phenomena of extrasensory perception (ESP) and telepathy on a statistical basis. In addition to coining the term extrasensory perception, he coined the term psychokinesis (PK) to describe mental influence on external events. He founded and edited the Journal of Parapsychology, and his publications include New Frontiers of the Mind (1937). On retiring from Duke (1965), he continued his often controversial work at the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man.
Biography
Joseph (J.B.) Rhine was the second of four children born to Samuel Ellis Rhine and Elizabeth Vaughan Rhine in Waterloo, Pennsylvania. Samuel Rhine had been educated in a Harrisburg business college, had taught shool and later been a farmer and merchant.
He was educated at Ohio Northern University and the College of Wooster, after which he enlisted in the Marine Corps, being stationed in Santiago where he became a sharpshooting champion. There Rhine began the studies that helped develop parapsychology into a branch of science, looking upon it primarily as a branch of "abnormal psychology".
Based in Durham, Rhine's next work had two aspects: one was lab experiments designed to probe the actuality or lack thereof of the Lamarckian theory of inherited characteristics in animals;
Rhine tested many students as volunteer subjects in his research project. In the spring of 1931, Linzmayer scored incredibly high 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.
The following year, among the new subjects Rhine tested another promising individual, Hubert Pearce, who managed to surpass Linzmayer’s overall 1931 performance in (Pearce’s average during the period he was tested in 1932 was 40%, whereas chance would have been 20%).
The most famous series of experiments from Rhine's laboratory is arguably the ESP tests involving Hubert Pearce and J.
Rhine's research team also found other exceptional scorers among Duke students during the early 1930s.
In 1934, drawing upon several years of cautious and rigorous 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.
Legacy
Rhine almost single-handedly developed methodology and concepts for parapsychology as a form of experimental psychology and founded the institutions necessary for its continuing professionalization — including the establishment of the Journal of Parapsychology and the formation of the Parapsychological Association, and the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man (FRNM), a precursor to what is today known as the Rhine Research Center.
Criticism
Rhine has been criticized for not disclosing the names of assistants he caught cheating. Skeptic Martin Gardner wrote:
His paper "Security Versus Deception in Parapsychology" published in his journal (vol. [..] Rhine selects twelve sample cases of dishonest experimenters that came to his attention from 1940 to 1950, four of whom were caught "red-handed".
Assistants whose cheating has been made public in spite of Rhine's secrecy policy are James D. Gardner claims to have inside information that Rhine's files contain "material suggesting fraud on the part of Hubert Pearce".
In 1983 his wife Louisa Rhine (whom he had married during their university years) wrote a book Something Hidden. She wrote (Gardner 1988:240-43)
Jim [James D.
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