Robert H. Thouless

Robert Henry Thouless
Born	July 15, 1894
Died	September 25, 1984
Occupation	Psychologist, parapsychologist

Robert Henry Thouless (July 15, 1894 – September 25, 1984) was a British psychologist and parapsychologist. He is best known as the author of Straight and Crooked Thinking (1930, 1953), which describes flaws in reasoning and argument.

He studied at Cambridge University where he earned B.A. hons in 1914, an M.A. in 1919 and a Ph.D. in 1922. He was a lecturer in psychology at the universities of Manchester, Glasgow and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College in the University of Cambridge. He wrote on parapsychology and conducted experiments in card-calling and psychokinesis. His own experiments did not confirm the results of J. B. Rhine and he criticised the experimental protocols of previous experimenters. He is credited with introducing the word psi as a term for parapsychological phenomena in a 1942 article in the British Journal of Psychology. He served as President of the Society for Psychical Research from 1942 to 1944. Thouless identified as a "Christian psychologist". He questioned the alleged visions of Jesus Christ that the mystic Julian of Norwich reported to have experienced and concluded they were the result of hallucinations.

His An Introduction to the Psychology of Religion (1923, reprinted 1961) received a mixed reception from academics. One criticism of the book was the over-reliance of Freud's psychoanalyst approach to the subject. Professor James E. Dittes wrote that despite the obsolete Freudian views it is a useful elementary guide to the psychology of religion.

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