Chapter 6. Charles E. Stuart

Extra-Sensory Perception, by J. B. Rhine, [1934], at sacred-texts.com

CHAPTER 6

Charles E. Stuart

Mr. Stuart rose to prominence as a subject after Linzmayer but as an investigator he antedated Linzmayer's best work. The experiments made by Stuart with other subjects have been reported in detail already in Chapter IV and need not be repeated. In these tests he included some

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trials of himself and was encouraged by these results to go on to an extended series. It is of his own extra-sensory perception, then, that we shall write in this chapter.

Stuart is now a graduate assistant in this Department of Psychology and has been, through the years I have known him, one of the ablest students within my acquaintance. His own experiments were, I believe, very carefully conducted. He always impresses me as being very cautious and responsible. I think no one of our Departmental group would have the least hesitation in taking his report of his own unwitnessed experiments in E.S.P.

Stuart is of Scotch-American stock, one of a pair of identical twins. He has the capacity to be more positively suggestible than Linzmayer and can go into good hypnotic trance. He is perhaps not quite so stably integrated as Linzmayer; he is a little more imaginative, more emotional and more expressive. He is somewhat more sociable and has a fairly altruistic disposition. He is religious in an active but very liberal way, and has a definite interest in art. He even does some work in two different forms of fine arts and shows appreciation in several.

Although Stuart has had no definite psychic experiences, he has occasional "intuitions" in small daily affairs that may well be clairvoyant. His mother and aunt have had veridical psychic experiences; in his mother's case there was a visual hallucination of a wounded relative on the battlefield, correctly coinciding in time and detail so far as knowledge went. The aunt has had veridical premonitory dreams.

Stuart was a subject for Dr. Lundholm and myself in the trance-telepathy series. He scored, at that time, just a little above chance average, about 20% above. And that is the rate also in his first 100 trials witnessed by myself, exactly 20% above, which means an average of 6 hits per 25 calls. The other 40 trials I have witnessed raised the average for the whole 140 trials to 6.15 hits per 25. All the rest of his work is unwitnessed but, since he does not on the whole rise beyond the level of these witnessed results and since he is the responsible man he is, I feel that we may unhesitatingly offer his work to the public as fully endorsed.

Beginning in the autumn of 1931 and continuing through the school year, Stuart ran the huge sum of 7,500 trials. Marvelous patience indeed! These were not very high but, on account of the large number of trials, they take on great mathematical significance. The ratio of the positive deviation to the p.e. rises to 13.5 (and, if computed by sections, as is fully legitimate in so long an experiment under necessarily changing conditions, we get a still higher value, since the first 500 trials alone give a value of X 13.3). The average per 25 for the 7,500 was 6.05. Table XV will show these results in details of 500's. In his procedure Stuart

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held the cards behind him, cut the pack there at the start, and held each card by the corner between thumb and finger, recording each call when made and checking up after every 5 calls (and then reshuffling).

If the value of X is worked out from the separate values for sections of 500, which were all done on different days and to a certain extent represent separate tests with always varying mental conditions, we get for X the much increased figure of 18.14. This trouble is unnecessary, however, for purposes of proof, since 13.5 is adequate beyond question.

TABLE XV

First Series, Pure Clairvoyant Perception, by Stuart, 1931-32

The most remarkable feature of this table (XV), aside from its high significance in terms of X ("anti-chance value") is the relatively gradual decline of the rate of scoring. Taken, however, by 500's there is a peculiarly low drop in the 9th with a "comeback" for the 10th to the 12th, followed by a drop again. Taken in larger groups of 1500's the decline is steadier, the average per 25 being respectively, 7.1, 6.1, 5.7, 5.9, 5.4. In 2500's the decline is a bit more telescoped, but is clearly shown. The last 150 trials were slightly below chance and, after discussing it with me, Stuart discontinued for a time. We were interested in preserving his full capacity. He agreed with me that his interest had declined somewhat.

During the summer of ’32 I wrote Stuart, asking him to try some more E.S.P. work with the cards. His rate of scoring was found to be quite good again, averaging 6.8 in 25 for 250 trials. He continued for the summer, until 2,100 trials were made. These were about on the same scoring level, averaging 6.9 per 25 trials. They alone have a value of 12.5 for the ratio of deviation to p.e.

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But again the decline set in as before and, at the end of the 2,100, Stuart's scoring had fallen down almost to chance average. This effect can be shown best in the following table, XVI, in which the data are grouped in 400's in order to spread the decline effect out over more points.

TABLE XVI

Second Series, Clairvoyant Perception, Stuart, Summer, 1932

[paragraph continues] The falling off of the rate of scoring is apparently in the last 1000 trials; the first 1000 keep at a fair level. This second decline is much more abrupt than the first, but the better scoring period is longer (in point of number of trials) and more consistent scoring characterizes it.

Stuart introduced an interesting technique into the tests reported in Table XVI. He began on July 21 to make 2 calls for each card, one for "correct" and another that he thought was "incorrect". The two records were appropriately labelled and kept distinct. Pearce had been calling whole series with the deliberate purpose of getting all incorrect. But he was afraid to complicate the procedure by making both "correct" and "incorrect" calls on one card. Stuart found no difficulty, and, as one would expect, in general, his positive deviation on the High-Scoring and negative deviation on the voluntary Low-Scoring are about equal. They likewise decline together at about the same rate, as would naturally follow. Comparison of the two is made in Table XVII-A with the data grouped in 400's for the purpose of comparing the decline.

TABLE XVII-A

Comparison of Low-Score and High-Score Calls on Same Cards
Stuart, Summer, 1932

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[paragraph continues] The columns showing the percentage of deviation from the np value (chance expectation) bring the close similarity to a focus. Note also the closeness of the various values for the totals in the 5th line.

Another interesting accomplishment of Stuart was his huge day's work of July 21. He called 700 for high record and 600 for low. This is perhaps not equal to 1300 scores for high record but it is a huge day's work beyond doubt—the longest on our records; Zirkle is second with 950, and Pearce comes third with 900, for straight record. No one seems to have suffered, or have become fatigued especially. In all cases the scoring was up to par, even to the last. This evidence is directly contrary to the "fatigue-theory" as proposed by Miss Jephson. ¹

At present the most interesting phase of Stuart's work is his development of P.T. scoring; i.e., pure telepathy. He has only relatively lately got started at it and he does it with just about the same level of ability as he now shows on the P.C. work. (His late work on the clairvoyance has, however, been low.) On the 500 trials of P.T. he averaged 5.8 hits per 25. His regular B.T. trials, the 950 made since the work of Table XVII, gave only 5.7 hits per 25. This is quite naturally a most interesting comparison to follow up.

Stuart has tried D.T. clairvoyance but has not done it very successfully as yet in all his 2100 trials; but, as just stated, in all of his work he has been scoring low for nearly a year. In the 2100 trials the average is only 5.3 per 25; and is not "significant" as yet—i.e., is not 4 times the p.e.—it is only about 2 times the p.e. But it shows the same type of curve which we found in Linzmayer's D.T. data, and have also found in the distribution of D.T. scoring by others; i.e., a curve showing greater frequency of successes as we approach either the top or the bottom of the pack by 5's. His data are as follows, totalled in number of hits in the order of 5's down through the D.T. pack: 40, 39, 36, 38, 49. He gets fewest near the center of the pack, as do several of the others.

Stuart, too, shows a distinct operating curve, in waves of 5's. That is, he tends to succeed better on the first and last of each 5 in his D.T. work, a matter perhaps of habitual rhythm of attention, since he has called over 10,000, 5 calls at a run. His totals of all the hits made in 1000 trials of D.T. work, obtained by superimposing the results by 5's and totalling, then, for each ordinal in the 5, yield the following: 46, 37, 37, 31, 51. These 1000 trials are not selected; they happened to be at hand and convenient. They show in total yield very little deviation from chance, only 2 above, but are interesting for this internal peculiarity, the distribution that produces the difference of 20 points between the 4th and 5th calls. This

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suggests a factor of internal motivation of the percipient—effort and attention, probably.

We have reported now a total of 14,700 trials made by Stuart, which represent great labor on his part and which also make a valuable contribution to the subject. They alone give a value of 21.16 or, if we correct for internal distribution in the large group, we get a value that goes beyond 24. This is in itself much in excess of the requirement for the thorough exclusion of the "chance" theory for these results. Stuart's results alone, then, would be an adequate basis for the dropping of the hypothesis of accidental or random distribution. They are summarized in Table XVII-B.

TABLE XVII-B

Summary of E.S.P. Results by Stuart, Himself as Subject, 1931-32

Total value of X or D/p.e. =√(6.2)²+(13.5)²+(12.5)²+(8.0)²+(1.6)²+(2.5)²+(3.2)² = 21.16

The cumulative value of the "anti-chance" index (X) for the 46,974 trials reported thus far is now equal to √(31.5)² +(21.2)² = 38.1, with the heaviest scorers and half the scores still to come.

Footnotes

71:1 Jephson, Miss Ina, Evidence for Clairvoyance in Card-guessing. Proc. S.P.R., 38: pp. 223-271, 1928.