Ray Hyman

Introduction

Ray Hyman (born June 23, 1928) is an American psychologist, a former professional magician and mentalist, and one of the founders of the modern skeptical movement. He is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Oregon, founder of the Skeptic's Toolbox, and a member of the executive council of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

Hyman's distinctive contribution is that he came to the study of paranormal claims from inside the trade that produces them. He performed as a mentalist from childhood, and the question that turned him toward psychology was not why psychics cheat but why audiences so readily supply the cheat themselves. His answer, that most deception is self-deception, became the organizing theme of a career spent on reaction time, cold reading, dowsing, ganzfeld ESP and remote viewing.

Early Life and Education

Hyman was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, to a Jewish family; his father was an accountant and his mother a dressmaker. He was bar mitzvahed at thirteen but said he never had a religious feeling, and he stopped attending services immediately afterward because he could see the whole thing was a phony ritual.

He was hired as a magician at age seven, billed as the Merry Mystic, performing for his school's parent-teacher association. Reading about Harry Houdini's campaigns against spiritualist mediums led him, by sixteen, to investigate spiritualist meetings himself. He has said he cannot remember a time when he was not a skeptic.

The turning point came through palmistry. Hyman initially believed that reading the lines on a palm yielded real insight into character. A friend suggested he tell a client the exact opposite of what her palm indicated; she found the reading uncannily accurate, and so did the clients who followed. He changed his major from journalism to psychology to find out why, and paid his way through university by performing magic and mentalism.

He took his bachelor's degree at Boston University in 1950, his master's in 1952, and his doctorate in psychology at Johns Hopkins University in 1953.

Academic and Professional Career

Hyman was an associate professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1953 to 1961, then moved to the University of Oregon, where he was appointed full professor in 1964 and remained until his retirement in 1998. From 1982 to 1983 he held the Thomas Welton Stanford Chair for Psychical Research at Stanford, known informally as the Spook Chair, during a sabbatical year devoted to reading the best parapsychological evidence rather than the worst.

Alongside the skeptical work he published hundreds of papers in mainstream psychology on perception, pattern recognition, creativity and problem solving, and became an expert in statistical method. He has said that he regards all of his publications as dealing with aspects of one interest, human error and deception. He also stayed inside professional magic for decades, appearing twice on the cover of The Linking Ring, the magazine of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, in 1952 and 1986.

From 1953 onward he was retained by United States government agencies to evaluate paranormal claims: a case of apparent dermo-optical perception, Uri Geller's metal bending in 1972, and the military remote viewing program. In 1976, after the Geller investigation brought him together with Martin Gardner, James Randi, Paul Kurtz and Marcello Truzzi, he became a founding member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and of its magazine the Skeptical Inquirer.

In 1989 he founded the Skeptic's Toolbox, an annual multi-day workshop in Eugene, Oregon, that teaches critical thinking by having participants examine and then perform the tricks themselves — a piece of pedagogy directly descended from the insight about his own palm readings: the best way to understand why a demonstration convinces is to try to make it convince.

He received the In Praise of Reason Award in 2003, the Robert P. Balles Prize in 2005 and the IIG Houdini Hall of Honor Award in 2011, and an honorary doctorate from Simon Fraser University in 2007 for his advocacy of unfettered skeptical inquiry.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The Hick-Hyman law

Before he was known as a skeptic, Hyman was an experimental psychologist working on choice reaction time. His classic paper showed that reaction time increases in proportion to the information content of the incoming signal rather than to the mere number of alternatives, a relation now standard in cognitive psychology as the Hick-Hyman law. It remains his most cited contribution within mainstream psychology.

The law is a genuine quantitative result, and it is narrower than it is often quoted. It holds when alternatives are equally likely and when each requires a distinct, unpractised response; it breaks down when the response is highly compatible with the stimulus, when the mapping is overlearned, and when the alternatives are unequal in probability. Later work has shown that the slope of the function varies with the type of material and the amount of practice, which means the law describes a family of effects rather than a single constant. Hyman's own later writing treats it as one instance of the general problem he cares about — how much information a person can take in and act on at once — rather than as a universal.

Cold reading and the invited inference

Hyman's 1977 Skeptical Inquirer article on cold reading is, by Paul Kurtz's account, the most requested reprint in the magazine's history. It lays out the techniques by which a reader produces apparently intimate knowledge of a stranger: stock spiels, fishing, the Barnum effect, vague statements the client completes for themselves. Related work on subjective validation traces back to the same question about the palm readings — see also Bertram Forer, whose 1949 classroom demonstration is the classic experiment on the phenomenon.

Hyman also identified a mechanism he called the invited inference, and applied it to himself. As a performer he always opened by saying he claimed no special powers, believing that shielded him ethically. He later realized the disclaimer did the opposite: by declaring nothing, he left the audience free to draw its own conclusion, and most concluded he was genuinely psychic.

The ganzfeld and remote viewing disputes

In 1982 Hyman and the parapsychologist Charles Honorton independently meta-analysed the same set of ganzfeld ESP experiments and published their exchanges in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1985. The outcome was a rare joint communique: there was an overall significant effect that could not reasonably be explained by selective reporting or multiple analysis, but the two authors disagreed about what it meant. Hyman held that the database was too flawed and too heterogeneous to support a psi interpretation and later, in 2007, argued that the autoganzfeld experiments had not been successfully replicated and showed signs of sensory leakage.

The pattern repeated in 1995, when Hyman and the statistician Jessica Utts were commissioned to review the government's remote viewing program. Working from the same data, Utts concluded that the results supported the existence of anomalous cognition and Hyman concluded that they established no usable phenomenon. The pair of reports is now a standard teaching example of how far two competent analysts can diverge on identical evidence.

Proper Criticism

Hyman wrote a short guide to critical writing, Proper Criticism, setting out six steps for skeptics: be prepared, be precise and constructive, be charitable to the strongest version of the claim, focus on facts rather than motives, avoid cheap shots, and concede what has been established. He has been explicit that the guide exists because skeptical criticism is often as sloppy as the work it attacks.

Major Publications

Water Witching U.S.A., on dowsing
The Elusive Quarry: A Scientific Appraisal of Psychical Research, 1989
"Cold Reading: How to Convince Strangers That You Know All About Them," Skeptical Inquirer, 1977 — an article, not a book
Hyman, R. and Utts, J., "The Evidence for Psychic Functioning: Claims vs. Reality," the 1995 remote viewing review

Titles such as "Debunking Paranormal Claims: The Role of the Skeptic" that appear in some listings do not correspond to any published work of Hyman's and should not be cited.

Impact and Legacy

Hyman's standing rests less on any single finding than on a standard of conduct. His willingness to sit in the Spook Chair, to co-author a communique with Honorton conceding a statistically significant effect, and to share a commission with Utts while reaching the opposite conclusion gave skeptical criticism a credibility that dismissive debunking never had. His analyses of the ganzfeld literature and of Gary Schwartz's afterlife experiments are still the reference points in those debates.

He has been criticized from both directions. Parapsychologists argue that his methodological objections are selectively applied and that the ganzfeld database survived the very meta-analysis he performed on it; they also point out that the joint communique with Honorton is far stronger than the retrospective summaries Hyman later gave. Skeptics, conversely, attacked him for signing that communique at all, on the ground that conceding an unexplained effect hands the field legitimacy it has not earned. The Utts-Hyman review generates the same double complaint and is frequently cited as evidence that adversarial collaboration has limits when the two sides do not share a prior.

A related objection concerns the commissions themselves. Hyman was repeatedly retained by government bodies that had funded the programmes he was asked to evaluate, and his remote viewing review was delivered to an agency with a strong interest in being told the programme was worthless. He has always maintained that the reports say what the data support, and the Utts report, commissioned on identical terms and reaching the opposite conclusion, is the best available evidence that the arrangement did not dictate the answer. But the structural point stands: an evaluator paid by the sponsor of the thing being evaluated is in a weaker position than one who is not, whatever the result.

A third criticism is internal to his own corpus. The cold reading and invited inference work, influential as it is, is descriptive: it classifies techniques and reports anecdotes rather than testing them under controlled conditions, and the underlying claims about subjective validation have been established experimentally by others rather than by Hyman. Much of the skeptical writing also appeared in a movement magazine rather than in peer-reviewed psychology, which gave it a wide readership and left it outside the ordinary machinery of correction.

His own retrospective is unsparing on that point. The mentalist who opened every show by disclaiming special powers believed he was being honest, and discovered that the disclaimer was the most effective part of the act.

Learn More

Bertram Forer — whose 1949 demonstration is the controlled experiment behind Hyman's account of cold reading
History of Psychology — the longer development of the discipline this work belongs to.
Positive Psychology — the movement's central hub on well-being and human strengths.
All Psychologists — browse the full biographical collection.

References

Hyman, R. (1985). A skeptical look at extrasensory perception. The Skeptical Inquirer.