Society founded in London, England, in 1882, branching out from the British National Association of Spiritualists. It was the model for the American society for psychical research (aspr), founded soon afterward. Its purpose was to investigate the scientific basis of a variety of apparently paranormal phenomena and report on its findings. Among its founding members were many eminent scientists, including Sir Oliver Lodge, J. J. Thomson, Sir William Crookes, Sir William Fletcher Barrett, and Lord Rayleigh. It publishes its Journal and its Proceedings, in which are recorded the results of many investigations of mediums, spiritualists, Telepathy, ESP—the whole range of paranormal phenomena.
The society, which included both believers in and skeptics of psychical phenomena, set out with the declared intention of approaching the subject scientifically. Oliver Lodge, for example, its president from 1901 to 1904, found the subjective and anecdotal approach (which had characterized almost all work on the subject) unsatisfactory. He sought a basis of testing psychical phenomena that could be statistically analyzed. He was the first to use cards with simple symbols on their faces the square, the circle, and the triangle to test telepathy. The idea was taken up much later by Joseph Banks Rhine (1895-1980) and his colleague K. E. Zener, who added two additional symbols to the pack, now known as Zener Cards.