John Palmer

Introduction

John A. Palmer is an American psychologist and parapsychologist who has spent most of his career at the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina, where he has served as Director of Research and, since 1994, as editor of the Journal of Parapsychology, the field's principal specialist outlet. His research has concerned the psychological conditions under which putative extrasensory perception occurs: whether the person believes psi is possible, how deeply an altered state has been induced, and — the factor he has emphasized most in recent decades — who is running the experiment.

Palmer occupies a distinctive position for a psychologist working on a marginal topic, and it is worth stating plainly at the outset. He trained in mainstream experimental psychology, not in parapsychology: a B.A. in psychology from Duke University in 1966 and a Ph.D. in the psychology of personality from the University of Texas at Austin in 1969. He has spent his career arguing that parapsychology should be held to increasingly strict methodological standards, a stance he formalized in a 1986 paper on "progressive skepticism." Critics who dismiss the field as unscientific have generally found him a harder target than his predecessors, which is part of why mainstream skeptics have engaged with him rather than ignoring him.

He is best known for a two-part review of the sheep–goat effect, published in 1971 and 1972, which consolidated decades of scattered findings into a single empirical generalization: people who accept that ESP might occur in the test at hand tend to score above chance, and people who reject it tend to score at or below chance.

Early Life and Education

Palmer's own account of how he entered the field begins in a high school library. In his senior year he found René Sudre's Treatise on Parapsychology, a book divided between the card-guessing experiments popularized in the United States by J. B. Rhine and a more lurid survey of physical mediumship and ectoplasm. What struck him was not the photographs but the omission: a topic with obvious implications for the philosophy of mind was being ignored by psychologists. He made parapsychology the subject of his valedictory address, closing with a plea for more research.

He chose Duke University partly because it offered financial aid and partly because Rhine's parapsychology laboratory was in Durham. As an undergraduate he served as a subject in experiments there and took summer research jobs, work that brought him into contact with a cohort of younger researchers — Charles Honorton, Robert Morris, Rex Stanford — who were, as he later put it, applying the methods and concepts of mainstream psychology to psi and were willing to be critical of claimed evidence built on faulty methodology. That combination of sympathy and skepticism became his own signature.

He then went to the University of Texas at Austin for doctoral work in the psychology of personality, finishing in 1969. He did no parapsychology there, though conversations with Stanford, then finishing his own graduate work, kept the interest alive.

Academic and Professional Career

Palmer's first academic post was as an assistant professor of psychology at McGill University, where he had expected to continue research on interpersonal attraction. He found the teaching load heavy and the students unmotivated, and after two years he left for a research position at the University of Virginia's Division of Parapsychology in Charlottesville, joining Rex Stanford along with Ian Stevenson and Gaither Pratt. He spent four years there, working mainly on the psychology of out-of-body experiences and, alongside Pratt, investigating two poltergeist cases. He also conducted a random mail survey of psychic experiences among several hundred Charlottesville residents and University of Virginia students — one of the earliest probability-sample surveys of its kind, later published in 1979.

From Virginia he moved to the University of California, Davis, to work with Charles Tart on whether ESP could be trained through immediate feedback, and to extend his out-of-body research to the ganzfeld, a mild sensory-isolation procedure. He then spent four years at John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, California, directing the first graduate-level degree program in parapsychology in the United States, from 1977 to 1981. He held a further research position at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.

In 1984 he joined the staff of the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man — J. B. Rhine's original organization, later renamed the Rhine Research Center — and he has been associated with it ever since, apart from a three-year gap between 2004 and 2007. He was Director of Education from 1988 to 2004, running the center's eight-week Summer Study Program, and Director of Research from 2000 to 2004 and again from 2009. He has edited the Journal of Parapsychology since 1994. He served twice as president of the Parapsychological Association, in 1979 and 1992, and received that body's Outstanding Career Award in 2012.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The sheep–goat effect

Gertrude Schmeidler had shown in the 1940s that participants who accepted the possibility of ESP in the test situation — "sheep" — scored above chance, while disbelievers — "goats" — scored at or below it. Palmer's 1971 review aggregated every controlled experiment then available, from 1947 onward, and found that thirteen of seventeen studies fell in the predicted direction, with six reaching significance. His 1972 follow-up added seven new experiments, five of them significant in the predicted direction. He also identified a methodological point that mattered more than the raw tally: the effect is strongest when belief is measured concretely — does this person think ESP might happen in this test — rather than as abstract belief in the paranormal. He concluded, cautiously, that the data supported a genuine but slight effect that is hard to detect with small samples.

Later meta-analyses by Lawrence (1993) and by Storm and Tressoldi (2017) reached broadly similar conclusions, though both attracted methodological objections, and Palmer later noted that all significant sheep–goat differences in his combined dataset had been in the predicted direction.

Altered states, out-of-body experiences, and the ganzfeld

Palmer's out-of-body research produced an explanation that is notably deflationary. In a 1974 study, volunteers who reported apparent separation from the body scored significantly below chance on the accompanying clairvoyance test — the opposite of what the literal interpretation predicts. Palmer's conclusion was that people sometimes show psi during an out-of-body experience not because consciousness leaves the body but because the hypnagogic-like state that precedes and accompanies the experience is itself psi-conducive. A 1979 ganzfeld study with Transcendental Meditators found that scoring correlated with the depth of the hypnagogic state, not merely with its presence.

The experimenter effect

Increasingly, Palmer's theoretical attention has gone to the experimenter. Reviewing the ganzfeld debate in 2003, he concluded that the aggregate database contains evidence for a genuine anomaly but that heterogeneity across experimenters blocks straightforward replication — which makes the experimenter, rather than the participant, the central variable any adequate theory must handle. He distinguishes experimenter psi, in which the experimenter's own unconscious psi might shape the data, from ordinary experimenter behaviour such as differential warmth or expectancy cues, and he holds that both probably contribute.

Progressive skepticism

In a 1986 paper Palmer proposed "progressive skepticism" as a posture: accept that the data are genuinely anomalous on their face, while demanding progressively stricter methodological standards as the claim becomes more extraordinary. The position was designed to answer both camps — it refuses the believer's complacency and rejects the skeptic's a-priori dismissal — and it shaped how the psi controversy was framed in the following two decades.

Major Publications

Palmer, J. (1971). Scoring in ESP tests as a function of belief in ESP: Part I. The sheep–goat effect. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 65, 373–408.
Palmer, J. (1972). Scoring in ESP tests as a function of belief in ESP: Part II. Beyond the sheep–goat effect. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 66, 1–25.
Palmer, J. (1979). A community mail survey of psychic experiences. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 73, 221–251.
Edge, H., Morris, R., Palmer, J., & Rush, J. (1986). Foundations of Parapsychology: Exploring the Boundaries of Human Capability. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Palmer, J. (1986). Progressive skepticism: A critical approach to the psi controversy. Journal of Parapsychology, 50, 29–42.
Cardeña, E., Palmer, J., & Marcusson-Clavertz, D. (Eds.). (2015). Parapsychology: A Handbook for the 21st Century. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

A caution about titles attributed to Palmer online. The Parapsychology Revolution: A Concise Anthology of Paranormal and Psychical Research (Tarcher/Penguin, 2008) was edited by Robert M. Schoch and Logan Yonavjak, not by Palmer and Adam Rock as several web pages claim. Lists that credit Palmer with a book titled ESP and Psychokinesis: A Philosophical Inquiry should likewise be treated as unverified — no such title appears in his bibliography.

Impact and Legacy

Palmer's influence runs along three tracks. As a researcher he turned a program-level finding into a field-wide generalization and then relocated the field's attention from the participant's beliefs to the experimenter's identity. As an editor and institutional figure he controlled publication standards at the field's main journal through the period in which meta-analysis and the ganzfeld debate were being fought out. And as a philosopher of science he gave parapsychology its most intellectually serious vocabulary for engaging its critics.

The criticism is correspondingly serious, and it is not marginal. The strongest form is the one Palmer's own work invites: parapsychology has now run for well over a century without producing a single effect that independent laboratories can reliably reproduce on demand. The 1988 National Research Council report Enhancing Human Performance reviewed the parapsychological evidence and concluded that it offered no basis for accepting the existence of psi; Palmer replied to that assessment jointly with Charles Honorton and Jessica Utts in 1989, arguing that the report had applied standards to parapsychology that mainstream research is not held to, and the exchange remains instructive on both sides.

The specific findings Palmer champions have drawn targeted objections. Ray Hyman, the most persistent critic of the ganzfeld database, argued that the apparent replicability of ganzfeld results was an artifact of methodological flaws and selective reporting rather than evidence of an anomaly; Palmer's own 2003 conclusion — that experimenter heterogeneity prevents easy replication — concedes a great deal of Hyman's case even while defending the aggregate. The sheep–goat literature has similar problems: Lawrence's 1993 meta-analysis required a file-drawer estimate of roughly 1,726 unpublished null studies, and Fiona Steinkamp pointed out that the analysis does not establish whether the effect comes from sheep hitting, goats missing, or some combination, which means it is not clear what the variable actually measures.

Palmer's standing response is progressive skepticism itself, and it has real force: he has repeatedly argued for tighter controls, published null and near-null results, and insisted that the data set be treated as an anomaly requiring explanation rather than as a confirmation. He has also published work whose results are unflattering to the hypothesis he is associated with — a 2006 study of distant influence on red blood cells found no overall effect and no difference between self-described healers and non-healers, and a 1974 out-of-body study produced significant psi-missing. That willingness to report unfavorable outcomes is the main reason skeptics have treated him as a serious interlocutor.

What remains unresolved is whether "progressive skepticism" describes a research program converging on something real or an indefinitely deferrable commitment. Palmer would say the question should be settled by better experiments rather than by argument, and that the methodological standards he has spent his career tightening are precisely what would allow the field to fail decisively if it is going to fail.

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References

Schmeidler, G. R., & Murphy, G. (1946). The influence of belief and disbelief in ESP upon individual scoring levels. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 36(3), 271-276.
Palmer, J. (1971). Scoring in ESP tests as a function of belief in ESP: Part I. The sheep–goat effect. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 65, 373–408.
Palmer, J. (1972). Scoring in ESP tests as a function of belief in ESP: Part II. Beyond the sheep–goat effect. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 66, 1–25.
Palmer, J. (1979). A community mail survey of psychic experiences. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 73, 221-251.
Palmer, J. (1986). Progressive skepticism: A critical approach to the psi controversy. Journal of Parapsychology, 50, 29–42.
Edge, H. L., Morris, R. L., Rush, J. H., & Palmer, J. (1986). Foundations of parapsychology: Exploring the boundaries of human capability. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Hyman, R., & Honorton, C. (1986). A joint communiqué: The psi ganzfeld controversy. Journal of Parapsychology, 50(4), 351-364.
Druckman, D., & Swets, J. A. (Eds.). (1988). Enhancing human performance: Issues, theories, and techniques. National Academy Press.
Cardeña, E., Palmer, J., & Marcusson-Clavertz, D. (Eds.). (2015). Parapsychology: A handbook for the 21st century. McFarland.