ESP Testing: Believe It or Not

Overview

Objectives/Goals The purpose of my project was to see whether certain people have ESP and if the results are positively affected by their belief in ESP. ESP is short for Extra-Sensory Perception, which means understanding the world around you without using your usual five senses. The type of ESP I tested for was clairvoyance. Methods/Materials Before testing each person I asked whether they believed in ESP. For each trial, I placed 12 cards from a standard 52 playing card deck face down in front of the subject, making sure they had no knowledge of the cards. The subject then predicted the suits of the cards by circling the corresponding suit on the prediction sheet. I flipped over the cards and recorded the number of correct predictions. I repeated this process until all of my subjects had completed 30 trials. Results The highest average of correct predictions per trial for any subject was 3.43. Four subjects were non-believers and had an average of 3.1. Three subjects were believers and had an average of 2.7. Conclusions/Discussion My results indicated that none of the subjects had ESP. Three subjects had better than average number of correct predictions but there is not enough evidence to conclude that they have ESP. There is no indication that the belief in ESP had any positive effect in the results. In fact, the subjects who didn't believe in ESP had a better average than those who did.

Competition history

• CSEF 2008 Cognitive Science (Junior Division Only) · Entry J0622

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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