The inner life
J. B. Rhine
Direct answer
J. B. Rhine (1895 to 1980) was the American researcher who, at Duke University from 1927, turned the study of psychic claims into laboratory experiment and made the term ESP familiar.
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At a glance
- Also called
- jb rhine, joseph banks rhine, rhine esp experiments, rhine duke university
- Found in
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Related
- Extrasensory Perception, Zener Cards, Parapsychology, Psychokinesis
J. B. Rhine (1895 to 1980) was the American researcher who, at Duke University from 1927, turned the study of psychic claims into laboratory experiment and made the term ESP familiar.
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Who was J. B. Rhine?
Joseph Banks Rhine trained as a botanist and came to psychical research through an interest in whether the mind survives death. At Duke University he set that question aside for one that could be counted: can a person name a hidden card more often than chance allows? With his wife Louisa Rhine and his colleagues he ran many thousands of card guesses and, later, dice throws, and he reported small but steady excesses over chance.
His lasting contribution is method more than result. He replaced the seance room with standard tasks, fixed odds and statistics, and when critics found faults he tightened the controls. As he did so the striking scores of his first years became rare. Admirers take that as proof of his honesty and critics as a sign of what the early scores were.
On the tree of the hidden arts: The sixth sense.
What sets J. B. Rhine apart
Rhine's distinctive move was to treat a psychic claim as a rate. He did not ask whether one astonishing event had occurred. He asked how many cards out of twenty-five were named, over thousands of trials, against an expectation of five. That shifted the argument from testimony to statistics and procedure, where it has stayed. He also set a standard of candour unusual in the field, making public in 1974 the altering of data found in his own laboratory.
- Lived: 1895 to 1980; trained as a botanist, doctorate at Chicago in 1925
- At Duke University: from 1927 to 1965, at first under William McDougall
- Key book: Extra-Sensory Perception, 1934
- Journal: the Journal of Parapsychology, founded in 1937
- Partner in the work: Louisa Rhine, who collected thousands of reported experiences
- Later base: a private foundation in Durham, now the Rhine Research Center
Often mistaken for something else: The Society for Psychical Research mostly gathered and weighed reports of unusual events; Rhine ran repeatable guessing tasks and counted the scores.
The story behind J. B. Rhine
He took a doctorate in botany at Chicago in 1925 and joined the psychologist William McDougall at Duke in 1927. His monograph Extra-Sensory Perception appeared in 1934, and he founded the Journal of Parapsychology in 1937. The cards he used were designed by his colleague Karl Zener. On retiring from Duke in 1965 he moved the work to a private foundation in Durham, North Carolina, now the Rhine Research Center. In 1974 he made public that his own laboratory director had been caught altering data.
Why J. B. Rhine matters
The words, the card tests and the statistical habits of the whole field come from his laboratory, and so do its longest running arguments.
How to read J. B. Rhine
Historians of psychology cite him as the founder of experimental parapsychology; both defenders and critics of ESP begin their case with his data.
J. B. Rhine in practice: an example
A student reading of a subject who scored nine out of twenty-five can ask what Rhine learned to ask: who shuffled, who recorded, and who could see.
Where readings of J. B. Rhine go wrong
His early high scores were obtained under looser conditions than his later work, and have not been matched since.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Aliases
- jb rhine, joseph banks rhine, rhine esp experiments, rhine duke university, father of parapsychology
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
Who was J. B. Rhine?
He was an American botanist turned psychologist who led the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University. From the late 1920s he tested telepathy and clairvoyance with card guessing and made extrasensory perception a common phrase.
What did Rhine's ESP experiments find?
He reported that some subjects named hidden cards slightly but consistently more often than chance. Critics pointed to flaws in the early procedures, and under stricter conditions the high scores mostly disappeared.
Did J. B. Rhine invent Zener cards?
The five designs were devised for him in the early 1930s by Karl Zener, a psychologist of perception at Duke. Rhine made them the standard tool of his tests, and they carry Zener's name.
