The psychology of Ouija

Scrutinised by science

But one of the most appealing aspects of table tilting was the fact that it could be practised at home, without the need for a medium or any special equipment, and countless amateur investigators could experience the mysterious powers for themselves. A less ghostly explanation for the forces was reported in 1851 by the physicist Michael Faraday (1791–1867), who developed a simple apparatus that surreptitiously recorded the muscle movements of sitters.

Faraday concluded that the movements of the table could be attributed to non-conscious muscle movements by the sitters themselves. In other words, the tilts were not necessarily even intended to be deceptive. Believers were actually moving their own bodies while being unaware of their motions, and because they were unaware of their actions, they attributed them to external forces.

In 1888, physiologist William Carpenter (1813– 85) coined the term ‘ideomotor effect’ to describe these unconscious muscular actions. Carpenter extended Faraday’s findings to other ostensibly occult instruments. He argued that ideomotor phenomena could explain the mystery underpinning a variety of uncanny objects including dowsing rods, pendulums and the planchettes of Ouija boards – in each case, the ostensibly external forces that operators reported experiencing may have actually been misidentified internal forces.

Carpenter’s experiments showed that these instruments could only provide accurate results if the operators themselves already knew the correct responses. In other words, the Ouija boards never provided answers that sitters themselves did not know, further reinforcing the idea that the energies driving the planchette were internally sourced, rather than externally generated.

Corruption and quiz questions

Misunderstandings about the ideomotor effect have continued well into the present day. For example, in 2014, James McCormick, a British businessman, was convicted of selling fake bomb detectors to various international police forces. McCormick’s devices were marketed as using principles similar to dowsing, with extreme life-or-death stakes. The operator was supposed hold the device, called the ‘ADE 651’, like a wand, and allow its subtle movements to direct them towards dangerous substances.

The devices themselves have been determined to be entirely non-functional. But thanks in part to the ideomotor effect, they could easily feel functional, especially if the operator were confident in their legitimacy.

Since the late 1990s, non-functional detection devices with names such as ‘Sniffex’, ‘GT 200’ and ‘Alpha 6’ were sold by various scammers to governments throughout the world, including those of Iraq, Egypt, Syria, India, Thailand and Mexico. The World Peace Foundation of Tufts University, which tracks corruption related to international arms trading, estimates that fake bomb detectors generated more than $100 million in profit between 1999 and 2010.

The concept of ideomotor action has also been the driving force for some contemporary psychological research. In 2015, a team of researchers at the University of British Columbia led by Hélène L. Gauchou demonstrated that Ouija boards could actually be used as a tool to tap into participants’ own unconscious knowledge.

In these experiments, volunteers were provided with a series of general knowledge questions that required yes/no answers (e.g. “Is Buenos Aires the capital of Brazil?”). The researchers revealed that when people were instructed to ‘ask’ a Ouija board for an answer they did not consciously remember, they were significantly more accurate than when they simply attempted to guess without the board.

Another recent study, published in 2018, arguably represents a contemporary update of Faraday’s procedure. Marc Andersen and his colleagues at Aarhus University set up eye-tracking cameras to study attendees at a Ouija board conference. Their results demonstrated that the spooky movements reported by participants may be attributable not simply to their own unconscious muscular actions.

The interactive movements of multiple individuals, each of whom has their hands on the planchette, may equally be responsible. “Our study solves the apparent paradox that participants on the one hand are producing the Ouija responses themselves, while they on the other hand are unable to predict those very same responses at an individual level,” Andersen explains. “In that sense, you could say that the ‘spirit’ is actually a representation of the collective ‘we’.”