The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Gertrude Schmeidler.md

aliases	category	tags	summary	born	died	location	relations	created	updated
Gertrude Schmeidler Gertrude Raffel Schmeidler Gertrude R. Schmeidler G. R. Schmeidler Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler Gertrude Raffel	Scientists & Researchers	Person Parapsychologist Psychologist SheepGoatEffect CityCollege ASPR Psychokinesis IngoSwann PSI 1940s 1970s	Experimental psychologist at City College of New York whose card-guessing experiments of 1942 to 1945 produced the sheep and goat classification of subjects, and who tested Ingo Swann's psychokinesis on thermistors in 1971 to 1973.	1912-07-15	2009-03-09	New York, New York	type with start role fn employed_by City College of New York 1945 psychologist, later professor and professor emerita of psychology 2 type with start end role fn employed_by Harvard University 1942 1944 research associate, working under Gardner Murphy and funded by the Richard Hodgson Fund 2 type with start end role fn employed_by American Society for Psychical Research 1945 1946 research officer 2 type with start role fn member_of Parapsychological Association 1957 charter member; vice-president 1957, 1958 and 1960; president 1959 and 1971 2 type with start end role fn reverse funded Parapsychology Foundation 1955 1959 research grant to Schmeidler 2 true	2026-05-17	2026-10-09

Gertrude Raffel Schmeidler was born on July 15, 1912, in Long Branch, New Jersey, and died on March 9, 2009. She was an experimental psychologist at the City College of New York (CCNY) with a doctorate from Radcliffe College and Harvard University, who ran card-guessing experiments in the 1940s in which subjects were classed by their stated attitude to extrasensory perception as "sheep" or "goats," and in 1971 to 1973 tested the psychokinetic abilities of Ingo Swann on temperature recorders. Her papers are held at Duke University with those of the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory.¹

Education and early career

A reference entry drawn from Helene Pleasants's Biographical Dictionary of Parapsychology (1964) and from Arthur and Joyce Berger's Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research (1991) states that she took a B.A. magna cum laude at Smith College in 1932, an M.A. at Clark University in 1933, and a Ph.D. at Radcliffe College and Harvard in 1935; that she first met parapsychology through a just-published copy of J. B. Rhine's Extra-Sensory Perception in 1934 and took a course in psychical research with Gardner Murphy before completing her degree; that she taught at Monmouth College in Long Branch, New Jersey (1935 to 1937), was a research associate at Harvard (1942 to 1944) and a research officer of the American Society for Psychical Research (1945 to 1946), and began a long tenure at the City College of New York in 1945; that she was a charter member of the Parapsychological Association, elected vice-president in 1958 and 1960 and president in 1959; and that she received a research grant from the Parapsychology Foundation for 1955 to 1959. Her books listed there include ESP and Personality Patterns (with Robert A. McConnell, Yale University Press, 1958), ESP in Relation to Rorschach Test Evaluation (Parapsychology Foundation, 1960), Extrasensory Perception (Atherton Press, 1969), Parapsychology: Its Relation to Physics, Biology, Psychology, and Psychiatry (Scarecrow Press, 1976) and Parapsychology and Psychology: Matches and Mismatches (McFarland, 1988).²

At the founding in June 1957, when the founding council was chosen at Duke University, she was elected vice-president of the Parapsychological Association.³ The association's convention table lists her as president for 1959 (New York City) and 1971 (Durham, North Carolina).⁴

The Duke finding aid to her papers calls Murphy "Schmeidler's mentor and the person who first interested her in psychical research," and describes the collection as consisting chiefly of research data gathered "through her work with students and colleagues as an experimental psychologist and parapsychologist" at City College.¹

The sheep and goats, 1942 to 1945

Schmeidler's first report, "Predicting Good and Bad Scores in a Clairvoyance Experiment: A Preliminary Report," appeared in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in July 1943 (vol. 37, pp. 103 to 110), and "A Final Report" in October 1943 (pp. 210 to 221). The final report states that the experiment "was conducted for Dr. Gardner Murphy, and made possible by moneys available to him from the Richard Hodgson Fund of Harvard University," and that his advice "determined the topic of the research."⁵

The report describes the design. Subjects used standard ESP cards, 25 to a deck, with five hits expected by chance. Each was asked whether he had experienced telepathy, premonitions or crossed letters, or at least heard of such experiences, and then: "When that happens (or when you hear or read about it) is your first reaction, 'Oh, it was just a coincidence,' or do you first think, 'How interesting!' and then, 'Maybe it was a coincidence.'" Subjects who described themselves as uniformly skeptical were classed as goats, and those who admitted even a momentary "How interesting!" were classed with those who wholeheartedly embraced the ESP hypothesis, the sheep. Once classified, subjects "were exposed to a standard set of agreeable or disagreeable physical conditions." Goats made fifty successive runs without knowledge of their scores, were not offered cigarettes or candy, were signalled by "a rather raucous buzzer," filled out sheets on which many runs were crowded together, and sat in a "dark room" with no windows and battered furniture. Sheep were shown their score after each run and encouraged to discuss the procedure, were limited to ten runs a session, could stop when they pleased, were offered cigarettes and sometimes candy, were signalled by a small light, received a new record sheet for each run, and sat in "a reasonably pleasant office." The report states that it was predicted that sheep "would on the whole score better than five" and that goats "would make scores at the level of chance or lower."⁵

Three series were run, repeated, in the report's words, until the difference "either became non-significant or became unmistakably significant," with a criterion of a probability of one in a thousand. In the first series the open-minded subjects made 129 decks with a deviation of +56 (mean 5.43) and the subjects who expected chance scores 200 decks with a deviation of -10 (mean 4.95); the second series gave +33 over 127 decks (5.26) against -12 over 175 decks (4.93); and the third +31 over 133 decks (5.23). Combined, the open-minded subjects made 389 decks with a deviation of +120, a mean of 5.308, a critical ratio of 3.04 and a probability of .001, and the experiment was closed. Schmeidler drew the conclusion that "subjects who hope to score above chance in card-guessing tend to do so when tested under agreeable conditions; but that subjects who expect only chance scores and are tested under disagreeable conditions will tend to score at or below chance." She wrote that negative results "are to be expected if subjects are skeptical and bored, or uncooperative for some other reason, such as a too formal approach on the part of the experimenter." A footnote records that two subjects tested beyond the planned number, and one who presented himself after the third series, were discarded.⁵

Annie Jacobsen wrote in Phenomena (2017) that Schmeidler conducted an experiment in 1942 with psychology students at the City University of New York, coined the terms "sheep" and "goats" from her analysis of the data, and that sheep were those confident of the possible reality of ESP and psychokinesis and goats those who doubted it. Jacobsen added that "this explicit difference between believers and disbelievers has existed in the upper echelons of the U.S. military and intelligence communities since World War II."⁶

A review of 1958 for the Parapsychology Foundation, a copy of which is in the CIA's STARGATE collection, by Gordon L. Mangan of Victoria University of Wellington collated published attempts to repeat the finding and reported that "in 5 out of 6 cases, the sheep had higher ESP scores than the goats," while noting that "Schmeidler herself changed the criterion" of classification as her experiments progressed; in the series of 1943 subjects "were merely questioned as to their attitude to psychic phenomena in general."⁷ The Duke finding aid lists sheep and goat inspection records for 1950 and 1951 and ESP record sheets from August 1941 to 1951, and notes later work on the series by Murray Melnick and Christopher Scott.¹

Jacobsen also reported that Martin Gardner noted that psychic researchers often held that psychics were harmed by the presence of "goats," quoting Rhine: "The subtlest influences seem to disturb the operation of these [psychic] abilities... If the scientist is a disbeliever it will upset the delicate operation of the subject's [psychic] abilities."⁶

Eileen Garrett, Duke and Rhine

The Duke finding aid lists correspondence with the medium Eileen Garrett, president of the Parapsychology Foundation, for 1953 to 1955, and proxy sittings with Garrett and with the medium Caroline Chapman whose results for Garrett were never published; correspondence with J. G. Pratt of the Duke laboratory about the Chapman sittings in the mid-1950s; with Betty Humphrey, who worked in the Duke laboratory in the late 1940s and early 1950s; and with Charles E. Ozanne for 1953 to 1956. It states that "there is scattered correspondence between Schmeidler and J. B. and Louisa Rhine, but not a substantial amount."¹ The finding aid of the Parapsychology Laboratory records lists Schmeidler among the correspondents of Rhine from the postwar period.⁸

Ingo Swann and the thermistors, 1971 to 1973

The Duke finding aid lists Swann among the correspondents "who studied PK (psychokinesis) effects on temperature" and states that Schmeidler "collaborated with Swann" and co-authored journal articles from the research.¹ Her paper "PK effects upon continuously recorded temperature" appeared in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1973 (vol. 67, p. 325).⁹ In their paper in the Proceedings of the IEEE in March 1976, Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ wrote that Swann "had come to our laboratory fresh from a lengthy and apparently successful series of experiments with Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler at City College of New York."¹⁰ Jacobsen wrote that Swann cited the City College experiments in writing to Puthoff about investigating the boundary between the physics of the animate and the inanimate.⁶

In the Princeton Alumni Weekly of December 4, 1978, Robert G. Jahn of Princeton University wrote that he and an undergraduate, Carol Kay Curry, "chose to replicate an experiment using thermistors that was performed by Gertrude Schmeidler and the psychic Ingo Swann at the City University of New York a few years ago": two thermistors in vacuum bottles, tied into a balanced electrical bridge, with the subject attempting to make one reading rise or fall relative to the other.¹¹

In the files of the STARGATE program

An unsigned paper in the CIA's STARGATE collection, "The World of the Supra-Sensory," undated but citing events as late as 1965, names "Dr. Gertrude Schneidler [sic], City College, New York" among "the better known individuals" associated with J. B. Rhine's group and the Parapsychological Association, alongside Carroll B. Nash of St. Joseph's College in Philadelphia, John Freeman of the Institute of Parapsychology in Durham, Sally Feather, Robert A. McConnell of the University of Pittsburgh, Montague Ullman, Rhea White and "Dr. Lawrence Cusler" of City College.¹²

SRI's Free World Psychoenergetics Research Survey of November 1983, by Beverly Humphrey and Edwin May for the Defense Intelligence Agency under contract MDA908-82-C-0034, lists Schmeidler's "Moods and ESP Scores in Group Testing" (July 1972) among its entries.¹³ An SRI final report of December 1988 on enhanced human performance investigations cites Schmeidler (1984) among "many excellent examples" of descriptive literature reviews in parapsychology.¹⁴ In a letter of May 13, 1995 to a CIA officer, May described a NOVA program of about 1983, "The Case of ESP," in which "Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler shows the sheep/goat effect in which 'believers' score better than do 'skeptics,'" and called the result "some of the strongest evidence (in the clear) for an anomaly in the field to that date."¹⁵

Footnotes

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1. Guide to the Gertrude Raffel Schmeidler Papers, 1943-1983, RL.01147, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University (30.8 linear feet, about 24,000 items), read in the Wayback Machine capture of September 5, 2019 of https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/schmeid/ ↩︎

2. "Schmeidler, Gertrude Raffel (1912-)," Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology (Gale), citing Berger and Berger, The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research (New York: Paragon House, 1991), and Pleasants, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Parapsychology (New York: Helix Press, 1964). https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/schmeidler-gertrude-raffel-1912 ↩︎

3. "Announcement of Formation of the Parapsychological Association," Journal of Parapsychology 21, no. 4 (December 1957), pp. 315-316. https://archive.org/details/sim_journal-of-parapsychology_1957-12_21_4 ↩︎

4. "PA Convention History," Parapsychological Association website, archived December 29, 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20161229231222/http://www.parapsych.org/section/23/convention_history.aspx ↩︎

5. Schmeidler, Gertrude Raffel. "Predicting Good and Bad Scores in a Clairvoyance Experiment: A Final Report." Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, vol. 37, no. 4, October 1943, pp. 210-221, with reference to the preliminary report, vol. 37, July 1943, pp. 103-110. Read in the archive.org scan https://archive.org/details/sim_journal-of-the-american-society-for-psychical-research_1943-10_37_4 ↩︎

6. Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. ↩︎

7. Mangan, Gordon L. A Review of Published Research on the Relationship of Some Personality Variables to ESP Scoring Level, Parapsychological Monographs no. 1, Parapsychology Foundation, 1958, CIA-RDP96-00787R000400100014-4. ↩︎

8. Guide to the Parapsychology Laboratory Records, 1893-1984, RL.00992, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, scope note on postwar correspondents, read in the Wayback Machine capture of 2019 of https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/paralab/ ↩︎

9. Schmeidler, G. R. "PK effects upon continuously recorded temperature." Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, vol. 67, 1973, p. 325, as cited in Jahn, Robert G., "Psychic Process, Energy Transfer, and Things That Go Bump in the Night," Princeton Alumni Weekly, December 4, 1978, CIA-RDP96-00787R000500380004-4, and in Puthoff and Targ's 1976 Proceedings paper, reference 56. ↩︎

10. Puthoff, Harold E., and Russell Targ. "A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective and Recent Research." Proceedings of the IEEE 64, no. 3 (March 1976), section on learner subject S4, CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6. ↩︎

11. Jahn, Robert G. "Psychic Process, Energy Transfer, and Things That Go Bump in the Night," Princeton Alumni Weekly, special report, December 4, 1978, CIA-RDP96-00787R000500380004-4. ↩︎

12. "The World of the Supra-Sensory," unsigned and undated paper, CIA-RDP96-00787R000400040032-1. ↩︎

13. Humphrey, Beverly S., and Edwin C. May. Free World Psychoenergetics Research Survey, final report, November 1983, contract MDA908-82-C-0034, CIA-RDP96-00788R001800130001-9. ↩︎

14. Enhanced Human Performance Investigations, SRI final report, December 1988 (period November 1983 to October 1985), CIA-RDP96-00789R002200400001-3. ↩︎

15. May, Edwin C., letter to a CIA officer, May 13, 1995, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200190060-1. ↩︎