Parapsychology research organization continuing the work of the former Parapsychology Laboratory founded in 1935 by Joseph Banks Rhine at Duke University. Rhine was the pioneer advocate of laboratory research on psychic phenomena. In 1927 he joined the Psychology Department faculty at Duke, then under the chairmanship of William McDougall, a former president of the society for psychical research. Through the early 1930s, Rhine worked out the initial program of research and the new language that would be required for it. The Parapsychology Laboratory became the scene of numerous parapsychology experiments, the results of which were reported in Rhine’s pioneering texts New Frontiers of the Mind (1937) and Extrasensory Perception after Sixty Years (1940). With Joseph G. Pratt, Rhine and McDougall also founded and coedited the Journal of Parapsychology, still the premier journal for the new discipline.
Rhine’s positive findings on psychic phenomena were widely reported in the media and gave Rhine and the laboratory celebrity status. He found himself the center of two controversies, the first among psychical researchers whose methodology and research orientation he was challenging, and the second among his psychological colleagues who were hostile to the subject of his investigations. His research greatly disturbed fellow faculty members, some of whom were embarrassed by Duke’s association with such a questionable endeavor. Even fellow faculty member Karl E. Zener, who had originally designed the card deck used for testing ESP, turned on Rhine and worked to have him removed from the department. Rhine’s publications set off an academic controversy over ESP that has continued to the present.