Zener cards

Zener cards are cards used to conduct experiments for extra-sensory perception (ESP), most often clairvoyance. Perceptual psychologist Karl Zener designed the cards in the early 1930s for experiments conducted with his colleague, parapsychologist J. B. Rhine.cite web |url=http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/paranormal/bldef_zenercards.htm |title=Zener Cards |accessdate=2006-12-20 |work=Glossary of Skepticism & the Paranormal |publisher=About.com ]

Design

There are just five different Zener cards: a hollow circle (one curve), a Greek cross (two lines), three vertical wavy lines (or "waves"), a hollow square (four lines), and a hollow five-pointed star. There are 25 cards in a pack, five of each design.

When Zener cards were first used, they were made out of a fairly thin translucent white paper. Several subjects or groups of subjects scored very highly until it was discovered that they had often been able to see the symbols through the backs of the cards.Fact|date=July 2008 A redesign made it impossible to see the designs through the cards under any conditions. A subsequent deck featured an illustration of a building at Duke University on its reverse side, but the use of a non-symmetric reverse design allowed the deck to be exploited as a one-way deck.

Use in experiments

In a test for clairvoyance, the person conducting the test (the experimenter) picks up a card in a shuffled pack, observes the symbol on the card, and records the answer of the person being tested for ESP (the subject), who must correctly determine which of the five designs is on the card in question. The experimenter continues until all the cards in the pack have been tested.

Third parties may oversee or videotape an experiment to make sure it is conducted fairly. While it is especially important to ensure that the subject cannot see any cards and does not receive any vocal or visual cues from the experimenter, other methods of cheating are possible. To this end, physical separators may be placed between the experimenter and the subject. As with other ESP tests, experiments with Zener cards have used elaborate methods to keep the subject from seeing the cards or the experimenter, sometimes placing the subject in a separate room.

If the subject is informed during the test that specific guesses were correct or incorrect, card counting can increase their accuracy; also, poor shuffling methods can make the order of cards in the deck easier to predict.cite web |url=http://www.skepdic.com/zener.html |title=Zener ESP Cards |author=Carroll, Todd |date=2006-02-17 |publisher=The Skeptic's Dictionary |accessdate=2006-07-18 ] In his experiments, Rhine first shuffled the cards by hand but later decided to use a machine for shuffling.

Online variations of Zener card tests currently exist on the internet. If properly constructed, tests of this nature can circumvent the issues of bias and cheating common to standard Zener card tests. One such online system, the Anima Projectcite web |url=http://www.animaproject.org |title=The Anima Project |accessdate=2008-04-08 ] , gathers user results into a master database which is then analyzed using a variety of statistical techniques.

Although Zener cards are usually used to test for clairvoyance, they may also be used to test for telepathy, in which case one subject will draw a card and attempt to mentally project the image on it to the mind of another subject. Here, the statistical tendency of the receiver to report a specific design must be taken into account — for example, they might tend to report receiving an image of a square more than other images — so the deck used must contain an equal number of cards of each design.

tatistics

If the null-hypothesis (no psychic ability) is assumed and each card selected for testing is chosen in a truly random fashion, a user's success ratio is expected to approach 20% (1 hit per 5 trials) as their number of trials increases. The further the observed scenario is from the expected scenario, the more cause for believing the null-hypothesis is not true (the results are not simply due to chance).

References

References in Popular Culture

* In Ghostbusters, Peter Venkman uses Zener Cards to test ESP abilities of two test subjects, but cheats in favor of the female subject to flatter her.
* The Pokémon Kadabra has symbols on its forehead and body that represent the symbols of Zener Cards.
* Zener Cards are matched in The World Ends With You to power one character's 'Fusion' powers.
* Zener cards are used in the ESP minigame for

External links

* [http://www.animaproject.org Statistical analysis of precognition/clairvoyance involving online Zener card test]
* [http://www.hexatron.com/psi/index.html? Zener card test] (JRE download is required)
* [http://www.psychic-experiences.com/psychic-tests/zener-cards.php Zener Cards Online Test]
* [http://corz.org/wire/ A tool for two people to run Zener card tests over any network (For Mac, Windows & Linux)]