We sovereign professionals are a strong-willed lot, always completely in control and aware of the forces acting on us. So, I love this psychology study on Ouija users.

Psychologists at Aarhus University tracked the eye movements of users in the normal, involuntary, spirit-driven state and when using the planchette (pointer) to deliberately spell out words in a “voluntary” state.

Spoiler alert!

The experimenters found that:

when looking to see whether at least one participant in a pair made a predictive eye movement, the rates of prediction were just as high as for individuals in the voluntary condition (i.e. for any given move of the planchette, at least one person usually knew where it was going); second, rates of prediction increased in the Ouija board condition, but not the voluntary condition, presumably as the participants became increasingly aware of the diminishing number of meaningful options available.

Read the full spookiness, here.

Photo by dragonoak on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND