Parapsychology

Parapsychology

TYPEAcademic discipline

ALSO KNOWN ASPsychical research

NOTABLE CASE(S)Society for Psychical Research; Rhine Research Center; Ganzfeld experiments; PEAR laboratory

STATUSFringe science — not recognised by mainstream academia

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Parapsychology is the study of purported psychic phenomena — including Telepathy, Extrasensory Perception, Precognition, and Psychokinesis — using the methods of experimental science. The term itself was coined in 1889 by German philosopher Max Dessoir as parapsychologie, and was adopted in English by J. B. Rhine in the 1930s to replace the older term "psychical research," signalling a deliberate shift toward experimental laboratory methodology. It sits outside mainstream academic psychology, but has maintained a continuous tradition of formal, peer-reviewed research since the late 19th century.

History

Early psychical research

Formal, organised study of these claims began in 1882 with the founding of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in London, the first learned society of its kind. Its founders included classicist Frederic Myers, physicist Oliver Lodge, philosopher and economist Henry Sidgwick, and psychologist and philosopher William James, and its stated purpose was to investigate mesmeric, psychical, and spiritualist phenomena "in a purely scientific spirit" — including rigorous efforts to expose fraudulent mediums.

The Rhine era

The centre of activity shifted to the United States in the 1930s with botanist J. B. Rhine's work at Duke University. Rhine founded a dedicated Parapsychology Laboratory there in the early 1930s, and in 1934 published Extra-Sensory Perception, a monograph summarising six years of card-guessing experiments using Zener cards that became a landmark, and highly controversial, moment in the field's history. Rhine went on to found the Journal of Parapsychology in 1937 and the Parapsychological Association — still the field's main professional body — in 1957. His laboratory later became the independent Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, a precursor to today's Rhine Research Center.

The ganzfeld debate

From the mid-1970s, parapsychologists led by Charles Honorton developed the ganzfeld technique — testing telepathy under mild sensory deprivation — as an attempt at a more rigorously controlled experimental paradigm. In 1985, psychologist Ray Hyman, a prominent skeptic, published a meta-analysis of 42 ganzfeld studies from 1974–1982 identifying twelve methodological flaws, including inadequate randomisation and non-independent subsets of data inflating the apparent hit rate; Honorton published a competing meta-analysis of the same dataset reaching more favourable conclusions. Rather than continue the dispute, Hyman and Honorton jointly published a 1986 "Joint Communiqué" recommending stricter methodological standards for future ganzfeld research, leading to the development of the automated "autoganzfeld" procedure. Hyman later disputed claims that autoganzfeld results published by Bem and Honorton in 1994 represented a genuine replication, identifying statistical patterns he considered suggestive of an artefact — to which Bem responded that if the pattern proved to be a real property of psi, parapsychologists should call it "the Hyman effect." The debate over whether the ganzfeld effect has been genuinely and independently replicated has continued into the 2010s, with parapsychologist Lance Storm and colleagues publishing a 2010 meta-analysis defending the effect's consistency, and Hyman publishing a rebuttal the same year arguing that reliance on meta-analysis alone to establish an anomaly "distorts what scientists mean by confirmatory evidence."

The PEAR laboratory

From 1979 to 2007, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory, founded by then-Dean of Engineering Robert G. Jahn, conducted research into whether human intention could influence the output of electronic random event generators, alongside remote-viewing experiments. PEAR reported that participants could shift the output of its devices by a very small margin — roughly two or three results out of every 100,000 trials — which Jahn argued was statistically significant enough to be meaningful, though the finding was rejected by most of the mainstream scientific community and the lab was widely regarded within Princeton's administration as an institutional embarrassment. Skeptic James Alcock criticised PEAR's experiments for poor controls and documentation and the unruled-out possibility of data selection, though he provided no direct documentation for these specific suspicions. The lab closed in February 2007; Jahn and laboratory manager Brenda Dunne stated in a joint press release that they had "accomplished what we originally set out to do 28 years ago" rather than closing due to any specific controversy.

Methods

Parapsychological research has generally followed mainstream experimental psychology's own methods and standards, rather than developing entirely separate ones — Rhine's card-guessing protocols, PEAR's random-event-generator trials, and later presentiment studies measuring physiological arousal before a random stimulus are all close adaptations of standard laboratory technique. Precognition gives a fuller account of specific experimental traditions in that sub-area, including Zener card testing and Daryl Bem's contested 2011 "Feeling the Future" studies. Related spontaneous, non-experimental phenomena occasionally studied within the same institutions include Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis (poltergeist-type activity).

Reception and criticism

Despite adopting mainstream scientific methods, parapsychology has not achieved broad acceptance within academic psychology. Recurring criticisms include the field's history of failed independent replication, the file-drawer effect (unsuccessful studies being less likely to be published or noticed than successful ones), and statistical or procedural flaws identified in specific high-profile studies, exemplified by the decades-long ganzfeld dispute between Hyman and successive generations of parapsychologists. Rhine's own laboratory acknowledged several cases of researcher unreliability in its published record — including the 1974 Walter J. Levy fraud case documented at the Rhine Research Center — and more recent controversies, such as the reception of Daryl Bem's 2011 work, have made parapsychology a recurring case study in broader discussions about research standards and the replication crisis across psychology as a whole.

DISCIPLINE ASSESSMENT

PARENT FIELD

Psychology

ESTABLISHED

1882 (Society for Psychical Research, as "psychical research"); renamed "parapsychology" following Max Dessoir's 1889 coinage and J. B. Rhine's 1930s adoption of the term

KEY FIGURES

Frederic Myers; Henry Sidgwick; William James; J. B. Rhine; Charles Honorton; Robert G. Jahn; Ray Hyman (leading skeptical critic)

KEY WORKS

Rhine, Extra-Sensory Perception (1934); Hyman, "The Ganzfeld Psi Experiment: A Critical Appraisal" (1985); Bem & Honorton, "Does Psi Exist?" (1994)

METHODOLOGY

Applies conventional experimental psychology methodology — controlled trials, statistical analysis, and increasingly meta-analysis — to testing claimed psychic ability, rather than developing methods unique to the field

RELATED / CONTRASTED WITH

Distinct from Anomalistic Psychology, which applies conventional psychological explanations to why people report paranormal experiences without testing whether the phenomena themselves are real

ACADEMIC STATUS

Fringe science; not recognised by mainstream academic psychology, though maintained through dedicated institutions such as the Rhine Research Center and, until 2024, the Koestler Parapsychology Unit

SIGNIFICANCE

Parapsychology is the closest thing to a formal scientific research tradition within the subject matter this archive otherwise documents anecdotally, making its internal disputes — particularly the decades-long ganzfeld meta-analysis debate — a useful case study in how difficult it is to settle a genuinely contested small-effect-size claim through statistics alone, regardless of which side of the debate is correct.

Notable organisations

• Society for Psychical Research (founded 1882, London)
• Parapsychological Association (founded 1957)
• Rhine Research Center (successor to Rhine's original Duke laboratory)
• Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory (1979–2007)
• Koestler Parapsychology Unit

See also

• Extrasensory Perception
• Precognition
• Anomalistic Psychology
• J. B. Rhine
• Charles Honorton
• Ganzfeld Experiment
• Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis
• Ciarán O'Keeffe, a contemporary researcher who has worked in the field

External links

• Psi Encyclopedia — Meta-Analysis in Parapsychology
• Psi Encyclopedia — Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Laboratory
• Society for Psychical Research — official site
• Rhine Research Center — official site
• Parapsychological Association — official site