Psychic test: am I psychic?

How this psychic test works

This is a classic ESP card test. Each round, one of the five Zener symbols (circle, cross, waves, square, star) is chosen at random and kept face down. You pick the symbol you sense, and only then is the card turned over. Guessing alone gets 1 card in 5 right, so over 25 cards chance expects 5 hits.

The card is drawn by your browser's cryptographic random generator before you guess, and nothing on the page shows it until you have answered, so there is nothing to read from the screen. Each card is drawn fresh, which means every symbol has exactly a 1 in 5 chance on every card (more on why below). Choose 25, 50 or 100 cards: longer runs make luck smaller compared with any real effect. Use the mouse, a tap, or the keys 1 to 5.

What score shows psychic ability?

No single score proves or rules out anything. What the result can tell you is how often pure guessing does as well as you did. Over 25 cards the average is 5 hits, but luck spreads scores widely: exactly 5 hits happens only 19.6% of the time. Scoring 8 or more happens by chance 10.9% of the time (about 1 in 9.2), and 10 or more 1.7% (about 1 in 58).

These figures are exact: the chance of k or more hits is the sum, for every score from k to 25, of the number of ways to place those hits times 4 to the power of the misses, divided by 5 to the power 25. Your result shows the same calculation for the score and length you chose.

Keep in mind how many people take tests like this. If 20 people each do one 25-card run, the chance that at least one of them scores 9 or more by luck is 61.6%. Someone always gets the high score, so a high score on its own is expected, not remarkable.

How to know if you are psychic: what would count as evidence

A test can only say whether results beat chance under conditions that rule out other explanations. If you want a fair look at your own guessing, set it up the way researchers are supposed to:

• Decide in advance how many runs you will do (say, ten runs of 25 cards) and count all of them, including the bad ones. Stopping after a good run is the most common way to fool yourself.
• Use many trials. Over 100 cards chance expects 20 hits, and a real effect, if there were one, would stand out more clearly than over 25.
• Let someone else keep the record. Write down every score before you look at the next run.
• Judge the total, not the best run. Add up every hit across all runs and compare it with one fifth of all cards.

None of this turns a test into a verdict about a person. It only shows whether a set of guesses beat chance, which is all a card test can measure.

Zener cards and J. B. Rhine

The five symbols were designed in the early 1930s by Karl Zener, a perceptual psychologist, for card experiments with J. B. Rhine at Duke University. A standard Zener deck has 25 cards, five of each symbol. Rhine published his results in the book Extra-Sensory Perception (Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1934), which made the term ESP widely known.

The experiments drew strong criticism. Critics pointed to sensory leakage: in some setups, subjects could see faint marks on the backs of cards, or the face of a card reflected in the experimenter's glasses (an explanation given by Terence Hines). Psychologists Leonard Zusne and Warren Jones wrote that record keeping in Rhine's experiments was inadequate. Other laboratories struggled to repeat the results: at Princeton, William S. Cox tested 132 people over 25,064 trials in 1936 and reported no evidence of extrasensory perception.

Why our cards are drawn fresh each time

A real Zener deck holds exactly five of each symbol. If you are told each card after guessing, you can keep track of which symbols are used up and raise your score above 5 without any ESP: on the last card of the deck, the answer is certain. Mathematicians have studied the best strategy for this closed-deck guessing game (see the paper by Ottolini and Steinerberger below).

To keep the test honest while still showing you each card, every card here is drawn independently, as if the deck were reshuffled after each guess. Memory and counting give no advantage, and chance stays at exactly 20% on every card.

What later research found

Card guessing gave way to other designs. In Ganzfeld experiments, a receiver in mild sensory isolation tries to pick a target image out of four, so chance is 25%. Daryl Bem and Charles Honorton reported a 32% hit rate across a series of automated Ganzfeld studies (Psychological Bulletin, 1994). Julie Milton and Richard Wiseman then pooled 30 later Ganzfeld experiments and found no significant effect (Psychological Bulletin, 1999). A 2010 meta-analysis by Storm, Tressoldi and Di Risio counted 483 hits in 1,498 trials (32.2%); Ray Hyman replied in the same journal that a meta-analysis alone cannot establish that an anomaly exists. The debate is still open in the sense that the two sides disagree, but no design has produced a result that independent labs repeat on demand.

The US government ran its own remote viewing program, later known as Stargate. After a 1995 review by the American Institutes for Research, it was closed; the review found that remote viewing had never provided actionable information for an intelligence operation. Our guide to the types of psychic abilities covers this history in more detail.

Sources

• Wikipedia, Zener cards (Karl Zener, the 25-card deck, criticisms).
• Wikipedia, Joseph Banks Rhine (Extra-Sensory Perception, 1934; Hines; Zusne and Jones; Cox 1936).
• Wikipedia, Ganzfeld experiment: Bem and Honorton (1994), Psychological Bulletin 115(1); Milton and Wiseman (1999), Psychological Bulletin 125(4), 387-391; Storm, Tressoldi and Di Risio (2010), Psychological Bulletin 136(4), 471-485; Hyman (2010), 136(4), 486-490.
• Wikipedia, Stargate Project; CIA reading room, Stargate collection.
• Ottolini and Steinerberger, Guessing cards with complete feedback (arXiv, 2022).
• Score odds: our own exact binomial calculation (chance 1 in 5 per card).

Questions

Am I psychic?

A card test cannot answer that on its own. It can tell you how your guesses compare with chance: over 25 cards, guessing averages 5 hits, and 8 or more happens about 1 time in 9.2 by luck. Repeated runs fixed in advance tell you far more than any single score.

How do I know if I have psychic abilities?

Test the claim the way a researcher would: decide in advance how many runs you will do, use many cards, let someone else record every score, and compare your total hits with one fifth of all cards. Good runs that disappear when you add up every run are luck.

What is a good score on a psychic test?

Chance gives 5 out of 25 on average. A score of 9 or more happens by luck 4.7% of the time (about 1 in 21), and 10 or more 1.7% of the time. Any score is possible by chance, so the odds matter more than the number.

Is this ESP test random?

Yes. Each card is drawn by your browser's cryptographic random generator before you guess and shown only after. Every symbol has exactly a 1 in 5 chance on every card, and earlier cards do not change the next one.

Do you store my results?

No. The test runs in your browser and sends nothing. You can save a score to your journal, which stays on your device, and the share link carries only the number of cards and hits.

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