A botanist from Chicago who first became interested in Psychical research after hearing a lecture on spiritualism by Sir Arthur Conan DOYLE. In 1926 he became a research assistant to William McDougall in the psychology department at Harvard, following him to Duke University in 1927. His first published paper, in 1929, was on a mind-reading horse, Tady Wonder; he was soon shown to have been tricked by the horse’s owner but continued to believe in mindreading and prescient animals. In 1934 he published Extra-sensory Perception, by now convinced of its reality, and in 1940 he founded the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory and was named as it first Director.
In the 1930s he and colleague K. E. Zener had followed up an idea of Sir Oliver Lodge’s 50 years earlier. Lodge, a member of the Society for psychical research, was interested particularly in thought transference but became impatient with the unsatisfactory, somewhat uncertain nature of evidence to that time. In the 1880s he introduced the idea of using cards carrying simple pictures a square, a circle, and a triangle so that the results of a series of thought transfers could be analyzed statistically. Rhine was attracted to the idea of quantifying psychical research and tried out several methods including the card reading experiment, now with five symbols and called Zener Cards. Rhine’s fame rests mainly on his laborious series of tests carried out on card guessing, especially on what are known as the Pearce-Pratt and the Pratt-Woodruff series. A detailed account of this work is given in ESP: A Scientific Evaluation (1966) by C. E. M. Hansel, and its revised version ESP and Parapsychology: A Critical Reevaluation (1980). Rhine also became convinced that precognition and psychokinesis could be demonstrated experimentally. He reanalyzed his card-guessing data to show that the receiver had better than chance success in predicting what the next turned-over card would be; that is, the subject could tell what was coming up without anybody else knowing, without Telepathy being involved knowing in advance: precognition. Psychokinesis is the effect upon some physical system obtained by just thinking or wishing. Rhine explored this effect on the roll of a dice and claimed better than chance results with some subjects.