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Parapsychology

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Origin from 1882

Parapsychology is the scientific research programme that investigates claimed psychic and anomalous phenomena, including telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, and the evidence surrounding mediumship, apparitions, and related experiences, using the controlled methods of experimental psychology and statistics. It began as an organized field with the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in London in 1882 and gained a laboratory foothold in the United States through J. B. Rhine's work at Duke University from the 1930s. Despite more than a century of controlled testing, including large government-funded programmes and repeated meta-analyses, the field has produced no result accepted by the broader scientific community as reliable evidence of a genuine psychic effect, and its most publicized recent claim, Daryl Bem's 2011 precognition studies, helped trigger psychology's wider replication crisis when it failed to replicate. It is best understood as a long-running, methodologically serious research programme with a consistently negative or, at best, contested evidentiary record, not as an established body of positive findings.

Facts
Debunked
Key Experiment
Daryl Bem published nine experiments reporting statistically significant evidence for precognition in a 2011 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 5
Independent pre-registered replications (Ritchie, Wiseman and French 2012; Galak and colleagues) failed to reproduce the effect; treated as a landmark case in the psychology replication crisis rather than established evidence for precognition.
Replication Status
Independent pre-registered attempts to replicate Bem's 2011 precognition findings, including a series by Ritchie, Wiseman, and French, found no effect; the episode became a touchstone case in psychology's wider replication crisis. 6
Daryl Bem published a set of experiments in 2011 reporting evidence for precognition, including a retroactive facilitation of recall effect in which subjects' present recall was said to be influenced by future study events. Stuart J. Ritchie, Richard Wiseman and Christopher C. French published Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem's Retroactive Facilitation of Recall Effect in PLoS ONE in 2012. The method was direct, pre-registered replication: the team ran three independent experiments following Bem's own published procedure as closely as possible, with the analysis plan fixed before seeing the data. All three replications found no effect. Because the replications were pre-registered and followed the original protocol, the episode is treated in the field as a central case in psychology's wider replication crisis, and Bem's specific finding is not treated as an established effect.
Disputed
Key Experiment
The United States government funded a remote-viewing research programme, run through SRI International and later SAIC as Star Gate, from 1972 to 1995; a 1995 CIA-commissioned evaluation split between statistician Jessica Utts, who found the statistics indicated a genuine effect, and psychologist Ray Hyman, who found the results methodologically unreliable. 4
The United States government funded a remote-viewing research programme from 1972 to 1995, run first through SRI International and later through SAIC under the name Star Gate. The American Institutes for Research produced An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications in 1995, a CIA-commissioned review with separate appendices by statistician Jessica Utts and psychologist Raymond Hyman. The method was statistical evaluation of the programme's accumulated experimental results by two independent reviewers with opposing specialities. Utts concluded the statistical pattern indicated a genuine anomalous effect; Hyman concluded the same results were methodologically unreliable. Both reviewers agreed, regardless of that statistical dispute, that the programme's output had no demonstrated operational intelligence value, and the programme was closed the same year on that shared finding.
Origins
Origin Period
from 1882 1
Place of Origin
England 1
Status
Status Today
In active religious use 1
Attestation
Earliest Attestation
The Society for Psychical Research was constituted in London on 20 February 1882 to investigate mesmeric, psychical, and spiritualistic phenomena using systematic methods, with Henry Sidgwick as its first president. 1
Research
Principal Researcher
Charles Honorton developed and championed the ganzfeld telepathy protocol from the early 1970s; psychologist Ray Hyman became its principal methodological critic, and the two jointly authored a 1986 statement on the state of the evidence. 2
Principal Researcher
J. B. Rhine established a parapsychology laboratory at Duke University in the 1930s, running large card-guessing trials and popularizing the term extrasensory perception in his 1934 book of that name. 3
Learn More
What Parapsychology Studies and How It Works

Parapsychology applies the ordinary tools of experimental psychology, controlled conditions, randomization, blinding, and statistical analysis, to claims that fall outside the phenomena mainstream psychology and physics currently recognize: telepathy, or mind-to-mind communication; clairvoyance, perceiving information without any known sensory channel; precognition, knowing future events in advance; psychokinesis, affecting physical systems by intention alone; and a wider set of related claims including near-death and out-of-body experiences, apparitions, mediumship, and poltergeist activity. Researchers in the field generally do not start from the assumption that these phenomena are real; the field's stated purpose, since its founding, has been to determine through controlled testing whether any of them can be demonstrated reliably, and serious parapsychologists have themselves debunked specific claims and mediums found to be using fraud or sensory leakage.

Its core experimental tool has been the forced-choice or free-response guessing task: a subject attempts to identify a hidden target, a card, an image, or a future random event, under conditions designed to rule out sensory cues. The best known protocol, developed from the 1970s, is the ganzfeld procedure, in which a receiver in mild sensory deprivation attempts to identify an image a separated sender is concentrating on; pooled results across decades of ganzfeld studies have shown a small statistical departure from chance that proponents read as evidence of an anomalous effect and skeptics read as an artifact of selective reporting or weak blinding, a dispute never fully resolved.

The Evidence Record and Institutional History of Parapsychology

No parapsychological claim has produced a result that has both replicated reliably across independent laboratories and survived close methodological scrutiny, which is the field's central and most consistent finding after more than a century of testing. J. B. Rhine's original 1930s Duke card-guessing results, which introduced the term extrasensory perception to wide use, were not reproduced under matched conditions by outside laboratories, including a large 1936 Princeton series that found no effect across more than 25,000 trials. The ganzfeld telepathy protocol produced the field's most durable statistical debate: in a 1986 joint communique, the psi researcher Charles Honorton and the skeptical psychologist Ray Hyman agreed that pooled ganzfeld results exceeded what chance or selective reporting alone could explain, while still disagreeing over whether that pattern demonstrated a genuine psychic effect.

The United States government funded a parapsychology programme, run through SRI International and later SAIC under the name Star Gate, testing remote viewing for intelligence purposes from 1972 to 1995. When the CIA commissioned an outside evaluation in 1995, the two reviewers split: statistician Jessica Utts concluded the statistical evidence indicated a genuine anomalous effect, while psychologist Ray Hyman concluded the results were not methodologically reliable; both agreed the programme's output had no operational intelligence value, and it was shut down. The field's standing weakened further after 2011, when psychologist Daryl Bem published nine experiments reporting evidence for precognition; independent pre-registered replication attempts found no effect, and the episode became a touchstone case in psychology's replication crisis.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Instigated and chaired the Russian Physical Society's 1875 to 1876 Commission for the Investigation of Mediumistic Phenomena, concluding Spiritualist doctrine was superstition.

Dowsing, Psi Phenomena

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Rhine gave the field its laboratory method and, in English, its name. Uncontested as a matter of intellectual history, whatever one concludes about the results.

Source Extra-Sensory PerceptionJ. B. Rhine
Source Koestler Parapsychology Unit, HistoryKoestler Parapsychology Unit

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Its large scale case collection and statistical testing methods shaped the later discipline of parapsychology.

Source Society for Psychical Research (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.

Source Pseudoscience and the ParanormalTerence Hines

Critiqued By

Source History of CSICOPSkeptical Inquirer
Frank Podmore, Historical Figures

Podmore worked inside the field with full access to its files and rejected nearly all of its positive claims. His scepticism was applied from within, which is why his negative verdicts carry weight.

James Randi, Historical Figures

James Randi argued for fifty years that trained scientists make poor judges of a claimed psychic, because their training assumes nature does not deliberately deceive while a magician's training assumes exactly that. He proved the point with Project Alpha, coaching two young conjurers who were accepted as genuine psychics by a university parapsychology laboratory for years before he revealed the deception himself.

Source The Project Alpha ExperimentJames Randi
Paul Kurtz, Historical Figures

Paul Kurtz argued that the pull toward parapsychology reflects what he called the transcendental temptation, a recurring human preference for explanations that cannot be checked. He founded the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal in 1976 to bring organized scrutiny to psychic and paranormal claims, and insisted, at least as a stated principle, that the committee investigate rather than simply deny a claim outright.

Source History of CSICOPSkeptical Inquirer
Ray Hyman, Historical Figures

Ray Hyman built his critique from inside the data rather than outside it, typically granting for argument's sake that an experimental effect exists and then contesting what causes it. He served on the National Research Council panel that reviewed parapsychology for the United States Army in 1988 and was one of two reviewers who evaluated the government's remote viewing program in 1995. His 1986 joint statement with the parapsychologist Charles Honorton, negotiating shared standards for evaluating the ganzfeld telepathy studies, is considered a model of a skeptic and a proponent agreeing on what would count as evidence.

Source A Joint Communique: The Psi Ganzfeld ControversyRay Hyman, Charles Honorton
Richard Wiseman, Historical Figures

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist who trained as a professional magician, published a widely cited 1999 meta-analysis with Julie Milton of thirty ganzfeld telepathy studies conducted after the original autoganzfeld series, and found no overall evidence of the claimed effect. His critique rests on two things a magician's training supplies that a scientist's does not, a working sense of how a psychic demonstration can be faked, and an interest in the ordinary psychology of attention and memory that makes such claims feel convincing.

Sources
1. Our History
Society for Psychical Research
2. A Joint Communique: The Psi Ganzfeld Controversy
Ray Hyman, Charles Honorton, Journal of Parapsychology, Vol. 50, 1986
3. Extra-Sensory Perception
J. B. Rhine, Boston Society for Psychic Research, 1934View the Source
4. An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications
American Institutes for Research, American Institutes for Research, 1995View the Source
5. Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect
Daryl J. Bem, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 100, 2011
6. Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem's Retroactive Facilitation of Recall Effect
Stuart J. Ritchie, Richard Wiseman, Christopher C. French, PLoS ONE, Vol. 7, 2012
Bertram Forer (reference article)
Wikipedia contributorsView the Source
Pseudoscience and the Paranormal
Terence Hines, Prometheus Books, 2003
History of CSICOP
Skeptical Inquirer, Center for InquiryView the Source
Modern Spiritualism: A History and a Criticism
Frank Podmore, Methuen, 1902View the Source
A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table
Michael D. Gordin, Basic Books, 2004
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