Ray Hyman (born 23 June 1928) is an American psychologist, professor emeritus at the University of Oregon, and one of the founding figures of the modern scientific skepticism movement. Across a career spanning more than six decades, he has been among the most consistently cited critics of parapsychological research, appearing repeatedly across cases documented on The Vault, including the Ganzfeld Experiment, the Stargate Project, and Cold reading.
Early life and path into psychology
Hyman was born in Chelsea, Category:Massachusetts. As a teenager and young man, he worked as an amateur magician and mentalist, including performing palm readings — an experience that became formative to his later career. He noticed that a subject's positive reaction to a palm reading had little to do with the actual lines on their hand, a puzzle that led him to switch from a journalism degree at Boston University to psychology.[1] He went on to complete graduate study at Johns Hopkins University, and joined the psychology faculty at the University of Oregon, where he remained for the rest of his academic career, becoming known in particular for his research on Hick's law in cognitive psychology.[2]
Founding CSICOP
Hyman's formal involvement in organised skepticism began through a chance connection to Uri Geller. In 1973, Department of Defense researcher Austin Kibler invited Hyman to visit the Stanford Research Institute to observe testing of Geller, who was said to be able to bend metal with his mind. Hyman and stage magician James Randi, both admirers of mathematician and magician Martin Gardner, first met in person backstage at an Alice Cooper concert in Portland, Oregon, in May 1973. Hyman found the SRI research "the most uncontrolled and poorly recorded data" he had encountered.[3]
Hyman, Randi, and Gardner formed an informal group initially called "Scientists in Rationality." Joined by Paul Kurtz and sociologist Marcello Truzzi, the group's work led to the 1976 founding of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) — now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) — and the launch of its magazine, Skeptical Inquirer.[2] Hyman has served on CSI's Executive Council since the organisation's founding, and received its highest honour, the In Praise of Reason award, in 2003.[4]
The Skeptic's Toolbox
In 1989, Hyman founded the Skeptic's Toolbox, an annual multi-day workshop held mostly at the University of Oregon and sponsored by CSI, training participants in the practical application of critical thinking to paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. The first Toolbox was held in Buffalo, New York, with Hyman joined by psychologist James Alcock and magician Steve Shaw (later known as Banachek); in most subsequent years it has been anchored at Oregon.[5]
The ganzfeld debate with Honorton
Hyman is one of the two central figures in the long-running academic dispute over the Ganzfeld Experiment. Through the 1980s, he argued that reported ganzfeld telepathy results could be explained by methodological flaws, particularly sensory leakage between sender and receiver, in direct disagreement with parapsychologist Charles Honorton. The two ultimately co-authored a joint 1986 communiqué, unusual for acknowledging a statistically significant ganzfeld effect across the pooled studies while continuing to disagree on what that effect actually demonstrated.[2]
The Stargate Project review
In 1995, Hyman was one of two reviewers — alongside statistician Jessica Utts — commissioned by the American Institutes for Research to evaluate the CIA's Stargate Project remote-viewing programme. Hyman accepted that the statistical results were internally consistent, but argued the underlying methodology had not sufficiently ruled out mundane explanations, and that even a genuine anomalous effect had not produced information of practical intelligence value. The CIA's decision to terminate the programme followed his assessment.[2]
Cold reading and other investigations
Hyman's 1977 systematic account of Cold Reading remains the most widely cited academic description of the technique, defining it as a procedure allowing a reader to convince a client they possess detailed personal knowledge the reader could not otherwise have. In 2004, Hyman led a CSICOP-organised test of Natasha Demkina, a Russian teenager who claimed the ability to diagnose illness by looking through a person's body; Demkina correctly matched four out of a required five medical conditions in a blinded test, a result considered a failure of her claim despite roughly a 2% probability of occurring by chance. Hyman published a detailed analysis of the test in Skeptical Inquirer.[2]
Honours
Hyman received an honorary doctorate from Simon Fraser University in 2007, and in 1982 held the Thomas Welton Stanford Chair for Psychical Research at Stanford University — informally known among psychologists there as the "Spook Chair" — during a sabbatical from Oregon.[1]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Ray Hyman."Alchetron.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 "Ray Hyman."Psi Encyclopedia.
- ↑ "The Spark That Started CSICOP."Skeptical Inquirer.30 December 2025.
- ↑ "The Skeptic's Toolbox — Workshop in Eugene, OR."Skeptic's Toolbox.
- ↑ "The Skeptic's Toolbox: 2013 workshop in Eugene, OR."Skeptic's Toolbox.