The procedural errors in the Rhine experiments have been extremely damaging to his claims to have demonstrated the existence of ESP Equally damaging has been the fact that the results have not replicated when the experiments have been conducted in other laboratories. In a very real sense, the Rhines and ESP have been the Blondlot and N rays of the middle part of the twentieth century. Crumbaugh’s (1966) comments on his failure to repeat the Rhines’ findings, even after years of effort, have been noted previously; other researchers fared little better when trying to repeat the Rhines’ work. By 1940 “six different researchers, using some 500 subjects in experiments totaling about half a million trials demonstrated nothing but chance scores” (Zusne and Jones 1982, p. 375). See also Hansel (1966, 1980) for detailed accounts of the failures to replicate Rhine’s findings.
Occasionally, of course, apparent replication would occur. It should be remembered, however, that replications were also reported of Blondlot’s N ray findings. As in the N-ray case, reports that seemed to support the Rhines’ work were few and could be attributed to some of the same procedural problems as found in the original work. In addition, it should be remembered that what is taken as evidence for ESP is above-chance performance on some sort of card-guessing task. If one tests enough subjects long enough, sooner or later one of them will score above chance at a statistically significant level, for at least some set of trials. Does this mean that, for this brief time, the subject possessed ESP? No, it simply means that chance is operating as expected. Let us assume that out of two hundred subjects, one scores significantly above chance at the .01 level. That is, the deviation from chance would be expected to occur once in one hundred times. This will impress no one who has any knowledge of statistics, since the fact that an event that is expected to occur by chance once in one hundred times does so when you give it two hundred opportunities to occur is not evidence of anything extraordinary.
Real-world analogues to the card-guessing experiments occur frequently. One can consider every spin of the roulette wheel, every throw of the dice, every draw of the card in gambling casinos the world over as a single trial in a worldwide ongoing study in parapsychology. At gambling casinos, the odds are in favor of the house by only a tiny margin (if the margin were greater, people would lose much more frequently and be much less willing to play). Nonetheless, this tiny margin is enough to produce huge amounts of money for the house. Over the billions of “trials” in this real-world “experiment,” there has been no hint of any deviation from the strict laws of chance. State-run lotteries offer another opportunity to look for ESP in real-world situations. Billions of state lottery tickets have been sold since New Hampshire introduced the modem state lottery in 1964. Skolnick (1985, personal communication) examined the data from the New York State Lottery for several years. He found that New Yorkers were not winning the lottery at a rate higher than chance. If ESP had been operating, even in only a minority of players, the rate of winning would have been higher than chance.
The argument is often made by proponents of paranormal claims that these powers cannot be used for profit, so when one tries to use ESP to foresee the outcome of a spin of a roulette wheel, a football game, or the movement of a company’s stock on Wall Street, psi powers promptly vanish. However, not all parapsychologists agree with this position. Rhine himself contended that highly motivated subjects did better in ESP experiments (Rhine and Pratt, 1962). For most people, money is a strong motivating factor.
In England, S. C. Soal attempted to replicate the Rhines’ findings. At first Soal believed he had failed, stating, “I have delivered a stunning blow to Dr. Rhine’s work by my repetition of his experiments in England… there is
Soal’s further work with Shackleton lasted for forty sessions and totaled twelve thousand trials. Cards with a picture of one of five animals were used instead of Zener cards with symbols. Each design was coded with a digit from 1 through 5. Before a session, Soal reported, he would obtain a random list of the digits 1 through 5 from a book of logarithms. He described in detail the procedure he used to obtain these lists of digits. This was important, as it permitted other investigators, years later, to find the exact source of the random digits used and to attempt to duplicate the tests. The random digits were written in a “target” column on the score sheets for the session and were used to determine the order in which the five different designs would be presented. Thus, if the digit 1 was the code for the elephant design, when a 1 appeared in the target column on a trial, the elephant design would be used. Shackleton would make his guess by naming the animal, not naming a digit. His guess was also coded into the appropriate digit and that digit recorded on the score sheet. Thus, if he guessed “elephant,” a 1 would be recorded in the “guess” column.
Soal’s work with Shackleton (reported in Soal and Goldney 1943) was extremely successful. It was long considered the best evidence for the existence of ESP by both proponents and skeptics. As might be expected, critics spent considerable time and effort attempting to refute the results. Frequently these attempts were unfair, distorted, or simply wrong (see Markwick 1985, for a brief review). Then in 1960 it was revealed (Soal and Goldney 1960) that in 1941, Soal had been charged with changing some of the l’s in the target column to 4’s or 5’s after a session. The accuser was a Mrs. Gretl Albert, who had taken part in the experiment as an “agent,” the individual who attempted to send the identity of the card to Shackleton. Soal originally denied the charge and did not permit it to be published until 1960.
The publication of Mrs. Albert’s charge heightened suspicion regarding the Shackleton studies. Medhurst (1971) examined a small portion of the data from Soal’s sessions with Shackleton and found that there was an excess of hits when the target was a 4 or a 5. Scott and Haskell (1973, 1974) examined all the data, using a computer, and showed that not only were hits much more likely to occur than chance would predict when the target was a 4 or 5, but that there were far fewer l’s as target when a 4 or 5 was guessed than would be expected by chance. These results showed how Soal had been cheating. He filled the target digit sequence with extra l’s. When Shackleton guessed a 4 or 5 on a trial when the target was one of these supernumerary l’s, the target was changed to a 4 or 5, whichever was correct. This inflated the hit rate to above-chance levels. Markwick (1978, 1985) discovered that Soal (who died in 1975) had cheated in a second way. He had left blanks in the target column and had later filled in the digit corresponding to whatever design Shackleton guessed.
The discoveries of how Soal had faked his results destroyed the credibility of his work in the eyes of skeptics and most parapsychologists. One parapsychologist, J. C. Pratt, who had worked with the Rhines at Duke, proposed an astonishing defense of Soal. According to Pratt (1978), Soal had powers of precognition and had inserted the extra digits in the target columns guided by his precognition. The desire to believe knows no bounds.
THE URI GELLER EPISODE
The Rhines had pioneered the study of parapsychology using card-guessing experiments. As the years passed, many became dissatisfied with this approach. It was dull for all involved, including the readers of the final papers. Worst of all, it failed to produce convincing evidence for ESP or other paranormal abilities. By the 1970s, then, the stage was set for something new to burst upon the scene. This turned out to be an Israeli psychic named Uri Geller. Starting with his arrival in the United States, Geller quickly became the parapsychological sensation of the decade. Many parapsychologists became convinced that in Geller they finally had positive proof that psychic powers were real and that they could be demonstrated more or less on demand. Geller also became a darling of the media, appearing on talk show after talk show, where his powers were amply demonstrated and declared genuine. He convinced millions that he was, at last, the real thing.
Geller’s alleged powers were truly amazing. He could bend solid metal objects with his mind alone. He could read minds. He could see inside sealed envelopes and boxes and tell what was in them. These powers were apparently verified when Geller was studied by physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at California’s prestigious Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Targ and Puthoff (1974) published a paper in Nature, one of the world’s leading scientific journals, in which they declared they had demonstrated that Geller’s powers were real.
Unfortunately for Geller and his supporters, it soon became obvious that the truth about Geller was very different from his claims. Geller turned out to be nothing more than a magician using sleight of hand and considerable personal charm to fool his admirers. The tests at SRI turned out to have been run under conditions
