I have been writing about the discredited technique facilitated communication for several years, and to explain one of the mysteries of facilitated communication, I’ve tossed off the phrase “it is a Ouija-like phenomenon.” I’ve also seen writers use the reverse formulation, describing the actions of Ouija board players as similar to facilitated communication. Recognizing that neither of these statements is a real explanation, I think it might be time to provide both a description of and an up-to-date explanation for the Ouija board phenomenon. You may be surprised to know there is a substantial amount of psychological research, both modern and classic, that bears on the case of the magic talking board.

Background

The beginnings of the Ouija board game go back to the Spiritualism movement of the nineteenth century. Several social forces came together to make the possibility of communication with the dead a reality for many people, and séances became wildly popular. The Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, claimed to be able to communicate with a murdered traveling salesman through tapping sounds, and they toured the country demonstrating their remarkable mediumship. This was at a time when the average life expectancy worldwide was roughly half of what it is today, and approximately 30 percent of children did not live to see their fifth birthday. Then, in 1861 came the American Civil War, and suddenly almost everyone was touched by loss. Soon both professional and amateur mediums were conducting séances featuring tipping tables, knocking ghosts, flying musical instruments, disembodied voices, automatic writing, and many other methods of communicating with the dead (Vyse 2019). It was out of this background that someone figured out a way to make money by marketing a board that would allow anyone to communicate with spirits at home.

The identity of the inventor of the Ouija board is a disputed question, but we know that in 1891, Elijah J. Bond of Baltimore, Maryland, was awarded a patent for a “talking board,” which he soon sold to William Fuld, who went on to make a fortune selling them (Hunt 1985). There is also some debate about where the name “Ouija” came from. For years, we were told the name was an amalgamation of oui and ja, the French and German words for yes. But according to Ouija board historian (who knew there was such a thing?) Robert Murch, the name came through the board itself when asked what it should be called (McRobbie 2013).

The Ouija board was and is quite literally a parlor game. The Spiritualist movement from which it came was largely conducted in the parlors of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century homes. In a 1920 tax case, the Baltimore Talking Board Company argued otherwise: “[The Ouija board] is a form of amateur mediumship and not a game or sport. By means of this board one is enabled to get in touch with the other side.” As a result, the company attorneys argued the board should be tax exempt (Hunt 1985, 6). The Internal Revenue Service took the opposing view, which the court found persuasive, and the company was obliged to pay taxes. But game or not, Ouija has an enduring following, and long after the Victorian spiritualist era ended, some people continued to believe that the board is a portal to a spirit world.

Until his death in 1995, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet James Merrill lived three blocks from my current home in Stonington, Connecticut (I never met him). For decades in the 1980s and 1990s, Merrill and his partner, David Jackson, would sit at their milk glass dining table and communicate with what they believed were spirits of both famous and unknown deceased individuals. They each placed a hand on an overturned blue and white willowware tea cup that they used as a planchette or pointing device, and they copied out the messages they received. Many of these communications made their way into Merrill’s poems, including the long epic The Book of Ephraim, which includes extensive dialogue attributed to a spirit of the same name who died on the island of Capri in 36 CE (Hammer 2015). Of course, this is not the only example of psychic inspiration in the literary world. Both the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) and the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, published books based on their wives’ automatic writing (Ludolph 2018).

I came across another example of strong contemporary belief about ten years ago when I used a Ouija board as part of a classroom project in a college psychology course. One student became very nervous and said her mother would not allow Ouija boards in their house because she believed they were evil. This kind of fear has been fueled by several horror films featuring Ouija boards, including the teen scream movies Ouija (2014), Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016), and Paranormal Activity (2007), as well as the horror classic The Exorcist (1973). Although she was quite anxious about the activity, my student finally agreed to participate as long as she didn’t have to touch the board.

The Ouija Phenomenon

1. The Ideomotor Effect

The more common reaction to the Ouija board is one of thrill and fascination. Although many nineteenth-century people paid good money to attend séances in a desperate attempt to hear from a departed loved one, others—perhaps even most séance attendees—probably considered it a spooky form of home entertainment in an era long before cable television or Netflix. Today, when pulled out at teen sleepovers or college dorm parties, the Ouija board game delights its users by removing their conscious sense of causation. With the hands of two people on the planchette, the pointer glides across the smooth surface of the board, often spelling out understandable answers to the questions posed. Given two or more willing players, the planchette seems to have a mind of its own. If the players had the conscious feeling of moving the planchette around to spell out the words, there would be nothing special going on. The success of the game derives from the breakdown of our sense of personal control.

The Ouija board is an example of automatism, in which we do something without the usual accompanying feeling that we are doing it. Automatism has been implicated in hypnosis, dowsing, automatic writing, and many other phenomena. How does this separation of feeling and action happen? Like the Ouija board itself, the earliest explanations of this spooky happening date back to the spiritualist era. From the beginning, there were people skeptical about spiritualism. The practice was rife with charlatans and frauds who faked their psychic happenings, and psychic researchers, including the American psychologist William James and magicians William Marriott and Harry Houdini, revealed many methods used to fake psychic events. But some of the actions of psychics appeared not to be deliberate or conscious.

British physician and physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter (1813–1885) was skeptical of the psychic beliefs that had recently become popular, but rather than debunking fraud, he was concerned with providing a nonsupernatural explanation for some of the unusual happenings at séances. He proposed that humans have three kinds of reflex action, none of which involve the conscious will. Excito-motor reflexes are controlled by the spinal cord and are responsible for respiration and swallowing. Slightly higher up in processing are sensory-motor reflexes that control our surprise reaction to a loud noise. Finally, ideomotor reflexes involve the brain because they are stimulated by ideas and emotions, but they produce action without engaging the conscious will (Stock and Stock 2004). In his classic textbook The Principles of Psychology, William James credits Carpenter with having named the ideomotor effect and gives examples of mindlessly eating raisins and nuts when they are presented or automatically swatting away dust on his sleeve mid-conversation (James [1890] 1983, 1130–1131). He suggested that the ideomotor effect was at work whenever an idea is “unhesitatingly and immediately” followed by action: “We are then aware of nothing between the conception and the execution” (James [1890] 1983, 1130).

Carpenter investigated reports of “table talking,” in which séance tables would answer questions by turning or tapping a leg. Other mediums employed wooden planchettes with caster wheels on the bottom and homemade letter boards placed on the table, much like our current Ouija board. Eventually, the planchette was sometimes fitted with a pencil so that messages could simply be written out on a blank page (see Figure 1). Carpenter’s conclusion was that “Putting intentional deceit out of the question for the moment … the supposed communications are nothing else than products of their own automatic mental operations, guided by the principle of suggestion” (Carpenter 1888, 303).

Researchers went on to study ideomotor action in the laboratory, and some of the most dramatic examples were demonstrated at the University of Wisconsin by Polish-American psychologist Joseph Jastrow (1892). For example, Jastrow invented the automatograph, one of the wobbliest planchettes ever made, by mounting a plate of glass on a table, placing three polished brass balls on top of the plate, and then placing a second pane of glass on top of the brass balls (see Figure 2). Finally, a metal rod was attached to the top pane of glass with a stylus at one end that etched a record of any movements on a piece of smoked paper, making an automatogram. Jastrow reported that when the user placed their hand on the top plate of glass, it was very difficult to keep the contraption still for more than a few seconds. A large screen was placed between the participant and the automatograph so that they could not see its movements, and the participant was asked to hold it as still as possible.

The automatograph revealed several ideomotor effects. For example, when a participant was asked to think about the building next door to the laboratory—while attempting to hold the automatograph steady—his hand moved in the direction of the adjacent building. Another participant was asked to hide a knife somewhere in the laboratory, then think about the knife while trying to hold the automatograph still. In this case, the participant’s hand moved in the direction of where the knife had been hidden. None of the participants felt these movements, because they were focused on trying to hold the automatograph still, so the implications for the movements of a conventional planchette in a Ouija board session were obvious. When movements are easy to make and have little resistance, the mere idea of a thing can allow us to do something—move the planchette toward “YES”—without the feeling that we are doing it. Classic nineteenth-century planchettes had wheels on the bottom, and the modern plastic ones have felt-tipped feet that slide easily across the surface of the board. But the ideomotor effect is not the only explanation for the magic of the Ouija board.

2. Action Projection

The ideomotor effect requires only one person. There was just one hand on Joseph Jastrow’s automatograph when it went wandering off in the direction of a hidden knife. But the Ouija board and facilitated communication require two people, and most séances involve larger groups of people. Once there is more than one person involved in an action, the relationship between the feeling of doing something—the sense of authorship—and the action itself becomes confused. A person may be contributing to a movement of a tipping séance table but attribute their actions to one of the other people involved or a supernatural entity.

American psychologist Daniel Wegner (2018) called this “action projection,” and the case of Clever Hans was one of the most dramatic examples. Clever Hans was a famous horse that, according to his trainer—retired Berlin mathematics teacher Wilhelm von Olsten—could think and calculate. When Hans was asked a question, such as what is two-fifths plus one-half, he would tap out the answer nine-tenths with his hoof by first tapping the numerator, followed by the denominator (Heinzen et al. 2015, 13). Clever Hans became enormously famous, and although he was offered large sums of money, von Olsten never accepted payment for his performances. Many experts believed Hans had genuine intellectual ability, but that all changed when psychologist Oscar Pfungst began to perform systematic tests and discovered that Hans was responding to unconscious cues from his trainer. Pfungst determined that Hans got the right answer only when the questioner knew the answer to the problem and the horse could see the questioner. He concluded that as Hans approached the correct number of taps, the questioner would make some unconscious gesture or movement that prompted the horse to stop. Hans was indeed a clever horse, just not clever in the manner advertised, and the relationship between questioner and student in the Clever Hans case is a classic example of action projection.

A current and very troubling example of action projection is facilitated communication, the bogus communication method often used with nonspeaking autistic people I have often written about in this magazine (see my article in this issue and Vyse 2020; 2018). In this case, a facilitator or “communication partner” holds the hand of the nonspeaking person with severe autism as they type on a keyboard. Research has shown that the communications are being controlled by the facilitator and not the nonspeaking person, but a curious aspect of this method is that the facilitators seem to be completely unaware that they are the authors of the typing. Due to the confusion caused by two people acting together, it is possible for the facilitators to project their actions onto the nonspeaking person. In the case of the Ouija board, the supernatural aura surrounding the activity encourages projecting the players’ actions onto a third entity—the spirits.

3. Planning and Predicting Action

Daniel Wegner (2018) proposed a general theory of how the feeling of control is generated. He suggested that there is an action planning phase prior to the act, and if, after the action takes place, it produces an effect that is consistent with the plan, then the person will experience a sense of agency, of having performed the act. In addition, Wegner proposed that the sense of control is strengthened by exclusivity, meaning that if there is no one else around, you must have been the one who performed the action. Both the Ouija board and facilitated communication disrupt the sense of control by violating this exclusivity principle and introducing another actor.

If you watch people using a Ouija board, you notice they are intently looking at the board. In a classic National Geographic episode, Mark Edward showed that blindfolded Ouija board users produce gibberish, which seems to contradict the view that spirits are controlling the messages.¹ In a field study conducted at a paranormal conference, a group of Danish and German researchers used the eye-movements of Ouija board players to demonstrate how the inability to make accurate predictions about an action may also diminish the sense of control (Andersen et al. 2018).

The researchers gave pairs of conference attendees glasses fitted with tiny cameras to wear and set them to work at a Ouija board (see Figure 3). The cameras were connected to a computer that recorded where each player was looking on the board. As a result, it was possible to determine whether the spots on the board where each player was looking predicted where the planchette would go next. In what they called the “voluntary condition,” the researchers asked the participants (who were all American) to simply spell out the word Baltimore. In a separate condition, the participants were asked to play Ouija in the normal way, asking the board whatever questions they wished. As you might imagine, in the voluntary condition, the eye movements fairly accurately predicted where the planchette would go. For example, prior to moving the planchette to “B,” the players would look at B on the letter board. Also, as one might imagine, in the Ouija condition, the players’ eye movements were much less accurate predictors of where the planchette would go; however, as more and more letters were spelled out, the players’ eye movements became more accurate predictors. The researchers concluded that part of what creates a lower sense of having moved the planchette oneself may be the reduced ability to predict the next letter during typical Ouija play. In addition, they concluded that the production of meaningful responses during Ouija play comes from the experience of working with a partner and becoming better at predicting upcoming letters over time. After many nights over several decades, poet James Merrill and his partner, David Jackson, must have been very good at predicting each other’s movements.

4. Prior Belief

After the paranormal conferencegoers in the eye-movement study had completed their Ouija board play, the researchers asked them several questions, and the results were strongly affected by whether the person believed in the Ouija board or not. People who agreed with the statement, “The Ouija board can be used to contact entities such as spirits, ghost, demons, angels, etc.” were also likely to say that, in the Ouija condition, the planchette moved on its own without assistance from either player. In contrast, participants who agreed with the statement, “The Ouija board is really driven by the subconscious mind of its users (i.e. the ideomotor effect),” typically said that their partner and, to a lesser extent, they were moving the planchette (Andersen et al. 2018, 9–10).

The differences based on faith in the Ouija board were some of the most powerful findings in the study, demonstrating once again how strongly our prior beliefs about a situation can color what we see—or, in this case, what we feel. Once you are committed to a belief, confirmation bias and motivated reasoning can set it. Almost anything that happens can be rationalized to support your prior beliefs.

***

The Ouija board has had a remarkable run. Born from spiritualist beliefs that are almost 200 years old, it has sold as a game for over 125 years. It continues to captivate kids and adults and inspire horror films. Most of us know that spirits, ghosts, and demons don’t exist, but something about the Ouija board has sustained its popularity for all this time. It isn’t supernatural, but the psychology of the arrangement promotes belief and amusement. Although the Ouija board is just a game, many of the same forces that have sustained its popularity are at work in facilitated communication, a far more dangerous delusion (Vyse 2024). As a result, the researchers, both classical and contemporary, who’ve revealed the natural phenomena that promote these supernatural beliefs have done us a great service.

References

Andersen, Marc, Kristoffer L. Nielbo, Uffe Schjoedt, et al. 2018. Predictive minds in Ouija board sessions. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

Carpenter, William B. 1888. Principles of Mental Physiology with Their Applications to the Training and Discipline of the Mind and the Study of Its Morbid Conditions. New York, NY: Appleton.

Hammer, Langdon. 2015. James Merrill: Life and Art. New York, NY: Knopf.

Heinzen, Thomas E., Scott O. Lilienfeld, and Susan A. Nolan. 2015. The Horse That Won’t Go Away: Clever Hans, Facilitated Communication, and the Need for Clear Thinking. New York, NY: Worth.

Hunt, Stoker. 1985. Ouija: The Most Dangerous Game. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

James, William. (1890) 1983. The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Jastrow, Joseph. 1892. Studies from the laboratory of experimental psychology of the University of Wisconsin. II. The American Journal of Psychology 4(3) (April): 381.

Ludolph, Emily. 2018. W.B. Yeats’ live-in spirit medium. JSTOR Daily (December 5). Online at https://daily.jstor.org/wb-yeats-live-in-spirit-medium/.

McRobbie, Linda Rodriguez. 2013. The strange and mysterious history of the Ouija board. Smithsonian Magazine (October 27). Online at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-strange-and-mysterious-history-of-the-ouija-board-5860627/.

Stock, Armin, and Claudia Stock. 2004. A short history of ideo-motor action. Psychological Research 68(2–3) (April 1): 176–88.

Vyse, Stuart. 2018. Autism wars: Science strikes back. Skeptical Inquirer (October 7). Online at https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/autism-wars-science-strikes-back/.

———. 2019. Superstition: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

———. 2020. Of eye movements and autism: The latest chapter in a continuing controversy. Skeptical Inquirer (May 20). Online at https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/of-eye-movements-and-autism-the-latest-chapter-in-a-continuing-controversy/.

———. 2024. When silence speaks: The harmful pseudoscience of facilitated communication. Reality’s Last Stand (June 24). Online at https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/when-silence-speaks-the-harmful-pseudoscience.

Wegner, Daniel M. 2018. The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Note

1. In his 1888 book, William Carpenter reported that when he asked a medium to close her eyes while using a planchette, she refused, saying such an experiment would show a “want of faith.” Carpenter then asked the medium to ask the spirits whether she might close her eyes, and the planchette said “NO.” Finally, Carpenter asked the medium to ask why the spirits said no, and the planchette spelled out “WANT OF FAITH” (Carpenter 1888, 305).