Joseph Banks Rhine

[2] While there, he and his wife Louisa E. Rhine were impressed by a May 1922 lecture given by Arthur Conan Doyle exulting the scientific proof of communication with the dead.

"[1][4][5] Rhine's interest in this topic was furthered after reading The Survival of Man, Oliver Lodge's book about mediumship and life after death.

[8] Rhine’s report that documented the fraud was refused by the American Society for Psychical Research, so he published it in the Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology.

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a letter to the Boston Herald attacking Rhine's "colossal impertinence...stupidity and malignancy.

Boredom, distraction, and competing obligations, on Linzmayer's part, were conjectured as possible factors bearing on the declining test results.

[4] The following year, Rhine tested another promising individual, Hubert Pearce, who managed to surpass Linzmayer's overall 1931 performance.

[4] The most famous series of experiments from Rhine's laboratory is arguably the ESP tests involving Hubert Pearce and Joseph Gaither Pratt, a research assistant.

[1][10] In the later 1930s, Rhine investigated "psychokinesis" – again reducing the subject to simple terms so that it could be tested, with controls, in a laboratory setting.

[1][11] In 1940 Rhine co-authored with Joseph Gaither Pratt and other associates at Duke Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years,[10] a review of all experimental studies of clairvoyance and telepathy.

In the early 1960s, Rhine left Duke and founded the Institute for Parapsychology, which later became the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man.

[citation needed] He also had a huge influence on science fiction after John W. Campbell became obsessed with his theories about psionic powers and ideas about future human evolution.

[19][20] The American psychologist James Charles Crumbaugh attempted to repeat Rhine's findings over a long period without success.

Crumbaugh wrote: At the time [1938] of performing the experiments involved I fully expected that they would yield easily all the final answers.

[citation needed] According to Terence Hines:The methods the Rhines used to prevent subjects from gaining hints and clues as to the design on the cards were far from adequate.

[24]In 1938, Harold Gulliksen wrote that Rhine did not describe his experimental methods clearly and used inappropriate mathematical procedures which overestimated the significance of his results.

[25] Rhine published Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years in 1940 with a number of colleagues, to address the objections raised.

The psychologist C. E. M. Hansel wrote "it is now known that each experiment contained serious flaws that escaped notice in the examination made by the authors of Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years".

[28]The science writer Martin Gardner wrote that Rhine repeatedly tried to replicate his work, but produced only failures that he never reported.

[29] Gardner criticized Rhine for not disclosing the names of assistants he caught cheating: His paper "Security Versus Deception in Parapsychology" published in his journal (vol.

Gardner mentioned inside information that files in Rhine's laboratory contain material suggesting fraud on the part of Hubert Pearce.

[34] Historian Ruth Brandon has written that Rhine's research was not balanced or objective, instead "motivated by the most extreme ideology" of vitalism.

Hubert Pearce with Joseph Banks Rhine.