Closure and Legacy

Rhine's methods drew sustained criticism from the outset. Statisticians largely accepted his mathematics, but experimental psychologists raised concerns about card handling, subject cueing and selective reporting of successful series, and some published failures to replicate his card guessing results outside Duke. Rhine responded by tightening experimental controls, introducing machine shuffling and screened card boxes, and by the 1940s the laboratory had shifted much attention from card guessing to dice throwing experiments intended to test psychokinesis, the purported ability of intention to influence a physical process.

The laboratory trained a generation of researchers, including Louisa Rhine, who built an extensive archive of spontaneous case reports alongside the laboratory's controlled experiments, and it published the peer reviewed Journal of Parapsychology from 1937 onward. Rhine reached Duke's mandatory retirement age in 1965, and rather than leave the program's future to a university administration that had never fully embraced it, he arranged to take the laboratory's remaining endowment off campus, ending four decades of parapsychology as an internal part of Duke University. The independent successor body he formed that year, initially called the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, continued the laboratory's work and in 1995 took the name Rhine Research Center.