John Edgar Coover
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John Edgar Coover (March 16, 1872 – February 19, 1938), also known as J. E. Coover was an American
psychologist A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior. Their work often involves the experimentation, observation, and explanation, interpretatio ...
and parapsychologist known for his experiments into
extrasensory perception Extrasensory perception (ESP), also known as a sixth sense, or cryptaesthesia, is a claimed paranormal ability pertaining to reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses, but sensed with the mind. The term was ad ...
.


Career

Coover carried out a psychical research programme at
Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...
(1912-1917).Asprem, Egil. (2014). ''The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900-1939''. Brill Academic Publishers. pp. 355-360. He conducted approximately 10, 000 experiments with 100 subjects to test for
extrasensory perception Extrasensory perception (ESP), also known as a sixth sense, or cryptaesthesia, is a claimed paranormal ability pertaining to reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses, but sensed with the mind. The term was ad ...
(ESP). He concluded after four years of research that "statistical treatments of the data fail to reveal any cause beyond chance". He also conducted 1,000 experiments with
psychic A psychic is a person who claims to use powers rooted in parapsychology, such as extrasensory perception (ESP), to identify information hidden from the normal senses, particularly involving telepathy or clairvoyance; or who performs acts that a ...
s and it was revealed that they had no advantage of any supposed psychic ability over normal subjects. His book ''Experiments in Psychical Research'' (1917) was well received by the
scientific community The scientific community is a diverse network of interacting scientists. It includes many "working group, sub-communities" working on particular scientific fields, and within particular institutions; interdisciplinary and cross-institutional acti ...
for its methodology, rigorous statistics and use of experimental controls. It was considered a debunking work of psychical research by the psychologist Edward B. Titchener. Coover had criticized the "metapsychism" of parapsychologists as it did adhere to the
scientific method The scientific method is an Empirical evidence, empirical method for acquiring knowledge that has been referred to while doing science since at least the 17th century. Historically, it was developed through the centuries from the ancient and ...
. He was highly critical of
mediumship Mediumship is the practice of purportedly mediating communication between familiar spirits or ghost, spirits of the dead and living human beings. Practitioners are known as "mediums" or "spirit mediums". There are different types of mediumship or ...
which he considered the result of credulity and deception. This led to a dispute with Thomas Welton Stanford a wealthy spiritualist and brother of the university's founder, who had helped fund the psychical research programme at Stanford. Thomas Stanford had endorsed the fraudulent medium Charles Bailey as genuine and requested for Coover to test the medium. However, Coover held strong doubts about Bailey and noted he been exposed as a fraud several times, most notably by the
Society for Psychical Research The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) is a nonprofit organisation in the United Kingdom. Its stated purpose is to understand events and abilities commonly described as psychic or paranormal. It describes itself as the "first society to condu ...
.


Aftermath

Although Coover attributed his results to nothing beyond chance, other parapsychologists such as Robert H. Thouless claimed that when certain data from his experiment was lumped together, it revealed evidence of a small psychic effect. This was denied by Coover who suggested there may have been recording errors on the part of the experimenter.Carroll, Robert Todd
"A Short History of Psi Research"
''
The Skeptic's Dictionary ''The Skeptic's Dictionary'' is a collection of cross-referenced skeptical essays by Robert Todd Carroll, published on his website skepdic.com and in a printed book. The skepdic.com site was launched in 1994 and the book was published in 2003 ...
'' . Retrieved 28 March 2016. "Others examined Coover’s data and found more than Coover did. Radin writes that the receivers’ ability to guess the right cards rated 160 to 1 against chance (1997: 65). F. C. S. Schiller found the data showed odds greater than 50,000 to 1 against chance, but he used only the data from the fourteen highest-scoring subjects. Coover replied that he could find all kinds of interesting antichance events if he were selective in his use of the data (Hansel 1989: 28). In 1939, psychologist Robert Thouless (d. 1984) found that if the data were lumped together from the main experiment, there were 44 more hits than expected by chance. Thouless suggested that the data supported some slight psychic effect. He calculated the odds of this happening by chance to be about 200 to 1. Coover attributed the excess hits to recording errors on the part of the experimenter."


Publications


''Formal Discipline From the Standpoint of Experimental Psychology''
(1916)
''Experiments in Psychical Research at Leland Stanford Junior University''
(Stanford University Press, 1917).


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Coover, John Edgar 1872 births 1938 deaths American parapsychologists Stanford University Department of Psychology faculty Place of birth missing