Parapsychological Association

By the mid 1950s Joseph Banks Rhine's parapsychology laboratory at Duke University had trained a first generation of researchers who lacked any professional body of their own, unlike psychologists or physicists, and who found it difficult to present work at general scientific meetings without dedicated peer review. Rhine convened a group of parapsychologists at Duke on 19 June 1957 to form the Parapsychological Association as a professional society modeled on other academic learned societies, with defined membership criteria, elected officers and a published constitution, rather than the broad public membership of bodies such as the Society for Psychical Research.

Unlike the SPR and ASPR, which had always welcomed lay members alongside scientists, the new Association restricted full membership to individuals holding an advanced degree and an active research or publication record in parapsychology, a deliberate attempt to professionalize the field along the lines of established scientific disciplines. The Association began holding annual conventions at which members presented and criticized one another's experimental work, distinct from the Journal of Parapsychology that Rhine's laboratory already produced. Its founding generation included many researchers then working at or trained by the Duke laboratory, giving the new society an early character closely tied to Rhine's experimental, statistical approach to extrasensory perception and psychokinesis.

The Association's standing shifted in 1969, when it applied for affiliate status with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the leading general scientific body in the United States. The application drew public objection from some AAAS members who considered parapsychology pseudoscience unworthy of the association's imprimatur, but it was defended at the annual meeting by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, who argued that refusing recognition to a field pursuing its questions with normal scientific method, whatever the merit of its conclusions, was itself unscientific.

The AAAS council approved the affiliation, and the Parapsychological Association has remained an affiliate ever since, a fact its members have long cited as evidence the field meets ordinary standards of scientific organization even where its specific findings remain rejected by most working scientists. Affiliation did not end the field's marginal status: parapsychology continued to struggle for space in mainstream psychology departments and federal funding, and the Association has periodically had to defend its standing against renewed skeptical challenges. It continues to hold an annual convention, publishes the Journal of Parapsychology in cooperation with the Rhine Research Center, and functions today as the principal professional and credentialing body for academic parapsychologists worldwide.