Parapsychology

Extra-Sensory Perception: Part II. The Experimental Results: Chapter 6. Charles E. Stuart

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This is a chapter from J. B. Rhine's *Extra-Sensory Perception* (1934), the foundational academic work that established experimental parapsychology as a laboratory discipline. The chapter presents detailed statistical results from card-guessing experiments conducted with a subject named Stuart, a graduate psychology student, who attempted to identify hidden Zener cards through what Rhine terms "clairvoyant perception" and "pure telepathy." Rhine's central argument is that Stuart's results — across roughly 14,700 trials yielding a statistical deviation 21+ times the probable error — are so far beyond chance expectation as to constitute scientific evidence for extrasensory perception. A distinctive feature is Rhine's attention to the *decline effect*: Stuart's hit rate consistently fell over long experimental runs before recovering when sessions were interrupted, a pattern Rhine treats as psychologically meaningful rather than as an artifact undermining the data. The chapter also documents Stuart's experiments comparing deliberate "high-score" and "low-score" calls on the same cards, finding symmetric above- and below-chance deviations, which Rhine presents as evidence of genuine cognitive control over the effect. The work is notable for its earnest application of statistical methodology (probable error ratios, sectional analysis) to phenomena that mainstream science has since rejected, making it as much a document of early 20th-century scientific culture as a parapsychology text.

Extra-Sensory Perception: Part II. The Experimental Results: Chapter 6. Charles E. Stuart

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