Running the Laboratory Floor at PEAR

Dunne's role at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory was the operational one, and the distinction matters when reading the published record. Robert Jahn supplied the institutional cover and the theoretical framing; Dunne, trained as a developmental psychologist at the University of Chicago, designed and supervised the sessions, managed the volunteer operators and maintained the database that the laboratory's claims rested on.

Over twenty-eight years that database grew to many millions of individual binary trials, an archive whose sheer scale is not in dispute even among those who reject every conclusion drawn from it. She co-authored Margins of Reality with Jahn in 1987, the fullest statement of the laboratory's position for a general readership, and a long series of technical reports in the Journal of Scientific Exploration. Her particular interest lay less in whether the aggregate deviation was real than in the pattern of individual differences within it, the observation that some operators appeared to produce larger and more consistent shifts than others and that pairs of operators working together sometimes produced different results again. That observation is either the most interesting thing the laboratory found or the clearest sign that its analyses were fitting noise, and which of those it is has never been settled.