Джозеф Бэнкс Райн: Парапсихологияның негізін қалаушы ғалым

American botanist and founder of parapsychology

Joseph Banks Rhine (September 29, 1895 – February 20, 1980), usually known as J. B. Rhine, was an American botanist who founded parapsychology as a branch of psychology, founding the parapsychology lab at Duke University, the Journal of Parapsychology, the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, and the Parapsychological Association. Rhine wrote the books Extrasensory Perception and Parapsychology: Frontier Science of the Mind.

Rhine was the second child of five children born to Samuel Ellis Rhine and Elizabeth Vaughan Rhine in Waterloo, Juniata County, Pennsylvania. Samuel Rhine had been educated in a Harrisburg business college, had taught school and later been a farmer and merchant. The family moved to Marshallville, Ohio, when Joseph was in his early teens. He was educated at Ohio Northern University and the College of Wooster, after which he enlisted in the Marine Corps, and was stationed in Santiago. Afterwards, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he received his master's degree in botany in 1923 and a PhD in botany in 1925. 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. Rhine later wrote, "This mere possibility was the most exhilarating thought I had had in years." Rhine's interest in this topic was furthered after reading The Survival of Man, Oliver Lodge's book about mediumship and life after death. He taught for a year at Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, in Yonkers, New York. Afterwards, he enrolled in the psychology department at Harvard University, to study for a year with Professor William McDougall. In 1927, he moved to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina to work under Professor McDougall. Rhine began the studies that helped develop parapsychology into a branch of science; he looked at parapsychology as a branch of "abnormal psychology."

Rhine lent an insight into the medium Mina Crandon's performances. He was able to observe some of her trickery in the dark when she used luminous objects. Rhine observed Crandon in fraud in a séance in 1926. 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. In response, defenders of Crandon attacked Rhine. Arthur Conan Doyle published an article in a Boston newspaper claiming "J. B. Rhine is an Ass." 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. Rhine relied on testing whether a subject could influence the outcome of tossed dice – initially with hand thrown dice, later with dice thrown from a cup, and finally with machine thrown dice. During the war years, Rhine lost most of his male staff members to war work or the military. This caused something of a hiatus in the conduct of new research, but the opportunity was taken to publish the large backlog of experiments that had been conducted since the early 1930s on psychokinesis. After the war, he had occasion to study some dramatic cases outside the lab. Rhine founded the institutions necessary for parapsychology's continuing professionalization in the U. S. — including the establishment of the Journal of Parapsychology and the formation of the Parapsychological Association, and also the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man (FRNM), a precursor to what is today known as the Rhine Research Center. His parapsychology research organization was originally affiliated with Duke University, but is now separate. 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.

Rhine's results have never been duplicated by the scientific community. A number of psychological departments attempted to repeat Rhine's experiments, but failed. W. S. Cox (1936) from Princeton University with 132 subjects produced 25,064 trials in a playing card ESP experiment. Cox concluded "There is no evidence of extrasensory perception either in the 'average man' or of the group investigated or in any particular individual of that group. The discrepancy between these results and those obtained by Rhine is due either to uncontrollable factors in experimental procedure or to the difference in the subjects." 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. I did not imagine that after 28 years I would still be in as much doubt as when I had begun. I repeated a number of the then current Duke techniques, but the results of 3,024 runs [one run consists of twenty five guesses] of the ESP cards as much work as Rhine reported in his first book were all negative. In 1940 I utilized further methods with high school students, again with negative results. It was revealed that Rhine's experiments into extrasensory perception (ESP) contained methodological flaws. The psychologists Leonard Zusne and Warren Jones have written that "the keeping of records in Rhine’s experiments was inadequate. Sometimes, the subject would help with the checking of his or her calls against the order of cards. In some long distance telepathy experiments, the order of the cards passed through the hands of the percipient before it got from Rhine to the agent." The card guessing method used in the Rhine experiments contained flaws that did not rule out the possibility of sensory leakage. Today, researchers discount the first decade of Rhine's work with Zener cards. Stimulus leakage or cheating could account for all his findings. Slight indentations on the backs of cards revealed the symbols embossed on card faces. Subjects could see and hear the experimenter, and note subtle but revealing facial expressions or changes in breathing. 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. In many experiments, the cards were displayed face up, but hidden behind a small wooden shield. Several ways of obtaining information about the design on the card remain even in the presence of the shield. For instance, the subject may be able sometimes to see the design on the face up card reflected in the agent’s glasses. Even if the agent isn’t wearing glasses it is possible to see the reflection in his cornea. 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. Rhine published Extra Sensory Perception After Sixty Years in 1940 with a number of colleagues, to address the objections raised. In the book, Rhine and his colleagues described three experiments—the Pearce Pratt experiment, the Pratt Woodruff experiment and the Ownbey Zirkle series—which they believed demonstrated ESP. 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". Rhine's experiments into psychokinesis (PK) were not replicated by other scientists. John Sladek wrote:

His research used dice, with subjects 'willing' them to fall a certain way. Not only can dice be drilled, shaved, falsely numbered and manipulated, but even straight dice often show bias in the long run. Casinos for this reason retire dice often, but at Duke, subjects continued to try for the same effect on the same dice over long experimental runs. Not surprisingly, PK appeared at Duke and nowhere else. The science writer Martin Gardner wrote that Rhine repeatedly tried to replicate his work, but produced only failures that he never reported. 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. 38, 1974), runs to 23 pages Rhine selects twelve sample cases of dishonest experimenters that came to his attention from 1940 to 1950, four of whom were caught 'red handed'. Not a single name is mentioned. What papers did they publish, one wonders? This has suggested to Gardner that Rhine practiced a "secrecy policy". Gardner mentioned inside information that files in Rhine's laboratory contain material suggesting fraud on the part of Hubert Pearce. Pearce was never able to obtain above chance results when persons other than the experimenter were present during an experiment making it more likely that he was cheating in some way. Rhine's other subjects were only able to obtain non chance levels when they were able to shuffle the cards, which has suggested they used tricks to arrange the order of the Zener cards before the experiments started. Rhine's colleague Walter Levy was exposed as falsifying data for an animal ESP test, which harmed the reputation of Rhine and of parapsychology, regardless of whether Rhine was personally involved. According to James Alcock, due to Rhine's errors, parapsychologists no longer utilize card guessing studies. Rhine has been described as credulous as he believed the horse "Lady Wonder" was telepathic, but it was discovered the owner was using subtle signals to control the horse's behavior. Historian Ruth Brandon has written that Rhine's research was not balanced or objective, instead "motivated by the most extreme ideology" of vitalism.