How do zener cards work

In other words, the psychic test itself is an example of survivorship bias. Using regular cards would prove that no one was psychic. Or, at least, not psychic in that way.

So the test had to be modified until it was possible for some people to be "proved" psychic through coincidence alone. Top Image: David Blanch. Sure, survivorship bias is rampant in pseudo-science a lot of it real science, too; I'm a scientist but I'm hardly convinced that Zener cards were invented for the purpose of making it easier.

I can't really see how they would. They were invented to standardize the tests. We need to find something about ourselves that exists independently of the body. Otherwise, when we die, that's it. So if telepathy operates independent of the body, it opens the door to a possibility that there is something within us that can survive death. What kinds of experiments did he perform while searching for the existence of telepathy?

He started with a test of simple playing cards. He began with children, but then moved on to Duke students. It was basically a simple test: "Can you tell me what playing card I'm holding? And he found that they could. He was using a regular deck of playing cards, and he found that people had certain biases—they would guess certain cards more often than others because they were very familiar with a regular deck. So he had a psychologist, Karl Zener, design him a set of cards with completely different symbols.

And these are the ESP cards that a lot of people are familiar with, the ones with the wavy lines, a star, a box, a circle, or a cross. Using these cards, he repeated the test with students and found that they were again able to tell him what symbol was on the cards without seeing them. What other experiments did Rhine and his colleagues conduct? The ESP cards really were their staple until the end. They refined the experiments over the years—first, they separated the student and the experimenter with a screen.

Ultimately, they were in separate rooms, and the tests were done double blind, so that even the person conducting the experiment didn't know what symbols were on the cards. The other experiments that they're known for are tests in psychokinesis, the ability to move objects with your mind. Again, the test that they used was a very simple one—rolling dice. They would see if the students could influence the roll of the dice. The experimenters would use their hands and throw the dice against the wall, but, later on, they were using machines to roll the dice, so it would be more random and the experimenter could not be accused of influencing the roll.

And they found, again, that the students did seem to have some ability to influence the roll of the dice, but the effect was a lot weaker. Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. Related Content Related Overviews extrasensory perception. Show Summary Details Overview Zener cards. Zener cards in A Dictionary of Psychology 3 Length: 96 words. All rights reserved. Style: MLA.

Get Word of the Day daily email! Test Your Vocabulary. Test your knowledge - and maybe learn something along the way. Need even more definitions? Just between us: it's complicated. Ask the Editors 'Everyday' vs.