Hubert Pearce

Every experimental programme in this field has depended on a small number of unusually productive subjects, and at Duke in the early 1930s that person was Hubert Pearce. A divinity student who had come to Rhine's attention through an interest in his mother's reported second sight, he was tested from 1932 and returned hit rates on the twenty-five card decks that were high enough to carry the laboratory's published averages more or less by himself.

In the distance series with J. Gaither Pratt he scored while sitting in a different building, which was the result that made the Duke work internationally known. His performance was also noticeably sensitive to circumstance. It rose when he was interested and fell when he was bored, and after an incident in which a visitor announced an intention to prove him a fraud his scoring dropped to chance and, according to the laboratory's own account, never recovered. Rhine treated that pattern as a substantive finding about the fragility of the ability. Critics have treated it as the more ordinary pattern of a result that disappears when conditions tighten or when the subject stops trying whatever he was doing. Both readings are on the record and the atlas does not choose between them.

Pearce is a useful case for anyone thinking about how this literature is built, because the record preserves his scores in great detail and almost nothing else. Papers about him run to trial counts, hit rates and deviations expressed to several decimal places, alongside careful diagrams of which room he sat in. His dates of birth and death, his later career, and what he himself thought about any of it are not established in the standard sources, and this atlas records no lifespan for him because it could not verify one. That imbalance is not an accident of archiving.

The Duke programme's whole argument was that the subject's personality and biography were irrelevant, that what mattered was whether the arithmetic departed from chance under stated conditions, and the reporting conventions followed from the argument. The cost is that the single most cited experimental subject in the history of the field is, in the literature, a column of numbers. The most substantial later engagement with him is hostile: C. E. M. Hansel reconstructed the buildings involved in the distance series and argued that the layout left a route by which Pearce could have observed the cards, a reconstruction Rhine and Pratt rejected in detail. Even that argument is about the building, not the man.