Extra-Sensory Perception is a 1934 monograph by American parapsychologist J. B. Rhine, summarising the first six years of card-guessing research conducted at his Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University. It is widely regarded as a landmark, and highly controversial, moment in the history of Parapsychology.
Note: the original 1934 edition predates the ISBN system; the number above is for a later Branden Press reprint and may not match the specific edition sold at the link below.
Overview
The monograph presented the results of Rhine's early Zener card experiments, in which subjects attempted to guess the sequence of a shuffled deck of five simple symbols under laboratory conditions. Rhine argued that a number of subjects, including divinity student Hubert Pearce, achieved hit rates well above what chance would predict, and proposed this as statistical evidence for the reality of extra-sensory perception.
Reception
The book drew an unusually large public response following a favourable review by the science editor of the New York Times, which brought Rhine's work far beyond the small psychical research community and prompted a wave of interest from other American and British laboratories attempting their own replications. Reaction within mainstream psychology, however, was sharply divided: many psychologists were hostile to the subject, Rhine himself was not a professional psychologist by training, and subsequent attempts to replicate his results at the level he reported proved difficult to achieve. A notable failed replication was conducted by W. S. Cox at Princeton University in 1936, using 132 subjects across over 25,000 trials, which found no evidence of extra-sensory perception in the group tested.
Legacy
Despite the controversy, Extra-Sensory Perception is generally credited with moving parapsychology from a loosely organised tradition of psychical research into a laboratory-based experimental discipline, and it laid the groundwork for Rhine's subsequent founding of the Journal of Parapsychology in 1937 and the Parapsychological Association in 1957.