The shock-reinforced experiment Venkman conducts on the college students parodies the Rhine Experiments, which related to ESP. In the 1930s Duke psychologist J.B. Rhine used Zener Cards (a deck of 25 cards, with each card having one of five possible symbols) to see if test subjects could sense which card a test administrator was looking at without seeing it themselves. Rhine reported that one test subject correctly guessed all 25, but the results have never been duplicated. Though Venkman's experiment seems to be based on Rhine's work, the scene is also inspired by the famous Milgram experiment, in which subjects were required to give increasingly powerful shocks to strangers. Ostensibly a study on memory and learning, Milgram actually investigated how far people would submit to authority.

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