Experimental parapsychology tries to reproduce and study the psi-phenomena in a laboratory under controlled circumstances. Because experimental parapsychology uses a method which - in contradiction to some defects in fieldwork - complies with scientific standards, this tendency is by far the most popular.

The very first experiments were performed in 1917 by a psychologist named Coover. During these experiments a pack of 40 ordinary playing cards was used. The ‘receiver’ had to guess the cards forwarded to him by the ‘sender’, who was located in a separate, closed room. In this way, Coover completed a series of 10.000 sessions. Even though he was extremely negative about his test results, the analysis of the original data showed - remarkably enough - a positive result. Probably Coover collapsed under the pressure of his financial ‘sponsors’. The breakthrough of the experimental research came in 1930, when J. B. Rhine developed a new method at the Duke University. Together with Zener, he developed a set of 25 cards with five recurring symbols. These symbols had to be simple and weren’t supposed to cause any visual stress. Therefore, they chose a star, a circle, a square, a cross and a shape made up of three waving lines. Before every session, the pack of playing cards was well shuffled. Next, every test person had to guess the order of the cards in the pack. The essence was to find out if the test person could make a right guess more often than the probability predicted. From this statistical point of view, numerous packs of cards needed to be checked. Therefore, Rhine carried out about 4 million individual sessions. The statistical evaluation of the data showed evidence that the test persons consequently scored above chance level. So, Rhine claimed that ESP was involved here. Even more interesting was, that these results showed psychological patterns, such as the failure of positive scores to appear under the influence of alcohol, and the susceptibility of the scores to an emotional state. Rhine’s success stimulated other researchers to further explore the subject, which led to new and improved methods. The five most important experiments so far are: