Scientific study of the ouija board

[Ninshub]

New Ouija Board Study Scientifically Explains How They Move

Paul Seaburn July 31, 2018

Marc Anderson from the School of Culture and Society at Aarhus University in Aarhus, Denmark, led the study, which was published in the current edition of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. He and his team set up a test at a paranormal conference where Ouija board sessions were popular. This was not a secret test – the 40 participants wore devices to track their eye movements as “watched” the planchette movements. Each pair participated in two tests – one traditional session when they asked the Ouija board their own question and another where they were asked to deliberately move the planchette to ‘YES’, deliberately move the planchette to ‘NO’, and deliberately use the planchette to spell ‘BALTIMORE’. (Baltimore? Ask your own Ouija to explain that one.)

The entire article is here:
Predictive minds in Ouija board sessions

[Ninshub]

Please do and share your thoughts, Max.

[Laird]

Interesting. A few thoughts on this study:

In the paper's conclusion (the final paragraph of the "Discussion" section), the authors state: "It seems that meaningful responses from the Ouija board are an emergent property of interacting predictive minds that increasingly impose structure on initially random events in the sessions".

That's certainly one plausible interpretation. An alternative interpretation seem possible though: that whilst the predictions do indeed occur and become increasingly accurate as the message unfolds, they are not used either consciously or unconsciously by the participants to generate the message - the message is supernaturally inspired and the predictions of the participants are based on simple observation of a process beyond their control. One way of testing whether this is a more plausible interpretation than the authors' would be to perform the same experiment with one or more non-participatory observers whose eye movements were also tracked, and to check whether those non-participatory observers predicted upcoming letters in a significantly similar way (in particular, with similar accuracy) as the participants did. Even if it turned out that their predictions were less accurate though, we could not definitively reject this alternative interpretation, because it could be that there is something psychologically different about being a participant that encourages the eyes of the participants to "flag" their minds' predictions more than those of the non-participatory observers, even though those observers' minds are making predictions with a similar degree of accuracy.

The authors compared the probability of the participants predicting the next letter to the letter number, finding a positive correlation. Another interesting comparison to have made would have been between the probability of predicting the next letter and the number of meaningful next letters possible given the words that might be formed from the letters so far (names and proper nouns would complicate this analysis though). Unfortunately, the dataset that the authors made publicly available does not contain any information about which letters were chosen, so it's not possible for any of us to attempt that comparison.

One potential problem that I noticed with the study is with what it counted as a "predicted" letter: it seems that any glance at the letter that ended up being chosen, however brief that glance was, and even if other letters were looked at for longer, counted as a "prediction". In the authors' words: "Any amount of time looking on the exact letter would qualify as a prediction". It might have been more useful, though also more time-intensive, for the study to have determined the total time between one letter and the next as well as all letters that were looked at in that interval and the amount of time for which each was looked at - but perhaps it was rare for more than one letter to be looked at, in which case gathering this extra data would probably not have been useful.

Ninshub, you said to Max, "Please do and share your thoughts, Max."

I missed that in the rules. Are you saying that you want to post things without people commenting? If that is the case, there seems little value on this board.

[Laird]

Tom, did you perhaps misread Ian as saying "Please do not share your thoughts, Max", when he actually wrote, "Please do and share your thoughts, Max"? Or am I misreading you?

[Ninshub]

Ninshub, you said to Max, "Please do and share your thoughts, Max."

I missed that in the rules. Are you saying that you want to post things without people commenting? If that is the case, there seems little value on this board.

On the contrary! I was encouraging Max to give us more of his thoughts when he's looked more into the study, as he said he would. I think everyone here is very interested whenever people take time to look into studies and share their reactions.

Thanks for correcting me. I had incorrectly predicted the next letters and hurried on. I apologize.

Laird is correct in noting that the question is more complex than the authors of the study let on. It is common to see a research report which seems to betray the author's reluctance to consider explanations related to the survival hypothesis.

Most of the Spiritualists I know assume an Ouija Board is a sort of crutch that helps the practitioner get past the fear of actually producing spirit contact. The assumption is that all of us have mediumistic ability. Some of us are abler than others. The idea of the board is that the sitters are inspired to move the planchette, but that the actual movement is unconsciously caused by the sitters.

If that model is correct, then one or more of the sitters (or interested observers) are aware of the message before the first letter. The actual movement of the planchette is a lagging effect which is unconsciously anticipated.

My practice is to mostly ignore table-tilting and planchette phenomena because, like mental mediumship, it is too easily colored by the worldview of the practitioner or an interested observer. That coloring most often reflects cultural contamination. The message may be initiated by a discarnate personality, but then, that is a different issue.

Thanks for correcting me. I had incorrectly predicted the next letters and hurried on. I apologize.

Laird is correct in noting that the question is more complex than the authors of the study let on. It is common to see a research report which seems to betray the author's reluctance to consider explanations related to the survival hypothesis.

Most of the Spiritualists I know assume an Ouija Board is a sort of crutch that helps the practitioner get past the fear of actually producing spirit contact. The assumption is that all of us have mediumistic ability. Some of us are abler than others. The idea of the board is that the sitters are inspired to move the planchette, but that the actual movement is unconsciously caused by the sitters.

If that model is correct, then one or more of the sitters (or interested observers) are aware of the message before the first letter. The actual movement of the planchette is a lagging effect which is unconsciously anticipated.

My practice is to mostly ignore table-tilting and planchette phenomena because, like mental mediumship, it is too easily colored by the worldview of the practitioner or an interested observer. That coloring most often reflects cultural contamination. The message may be initiated by a discarnate personality, but then, that is a different issue.

If there’s no evidential content it’s hard to form a view. There is a possibility that any subconscious ideomotor type movement is influence by something or someone external to the operator if one is open to the idea. Same with mental mediumship I guess.

[Laird]

If that model is correct, then one or more of the sitters (or interested observers) are aware of the message before the first letter.

This experiment would tend to if not falsify then at least render less plausible that model though, wouldn't you say? I mean, on that model, where the entire message is known at the start, one would expect the probability of predicting the next letter to remain constant throughout, rather than, as the study found, to increase with letter count.