Pearce-Pratt experiment

As for the second alternative, in the Pearce-Pratt experiment, we can objectively and precisely define what chance is and determine whether the results are significantly different from it. When you are guessing the identity of a deck of Zener cards (without looking at each card after guessing it), it is obvious (to scientifically accepted logic systems) that you have a l-in-5... 

Table 1-1 gives the results for the four subseries and the combined results of the Pearce-Pratt experiment. In all subseries, Pearce scored far more correct items than would occur by chance alone, and even in the least significant series, subseries C, such results would occur by chance less than 1 in 10,000 times (conventionally noted in the table and throughout this book as P < 10 4). In the most successful subseries, the odds... 

When all these alternatives have been ruled out, the theory best able to explain the data of the Pearce-Pratt experiment is that some form of psi (clairvoyance) was operating. The implied prediction that other people will be able to perform similarly under similar conditions has been validated in hundreds of successful experiments documented in the parapsychol-ogical literature. 

Pearce, a student at the Divinity School of Duke University. Pratt was the experimenter, and Rhine acted as data collector for all series and coexperimenter on the last. Procedurally, this was a clairvoyance experiment. The experimenter put cards in a designated spot at a designated time without turning them over and looking at them. Thus, there was no one trying to act as a sender. The targets were the well-known Zener cards, a deck of twenty-five cards, five each of five different symbols (a cross, a square, a circle, wavy lines, and a star). 

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