At one time or another, we've all thought about which cards are the most commonly thought of, the cards that would first come to most spectators' minds. While some cards do seem to stand out more than others based on experience, what about scientifically? Is there, by chance, a concrete and serious study on the subject? The answer is yes, and that's precisely the topic of this article!
This study, titled "Perceptual and Cognitive Characteristics of Common Playing Cards," was conducted by Jay A. Olson, Alym A. Amlani, and Ronald A. Rensink and is available for free and in its entirety right here.
This article is a popularization of this study, and all information comes from it. It should be noted that the study was conducted on a panel of English-speaking individuals, but given the results and our own experience, it can be fully transposed to France.
It should be noted that the experiment consisted of asking each participant the exact same question, asking them to think of a card, for a total of 423 participants. Below you will find the results of this experiment, with a larger bubble indicating a higher proportion of responses for that card:
As you can see, the Ace of Spades comes in first place, closely followed by the Queen of Hearts. For those who prefer numbers, you will find the different percentages below:
Thus, if we were to rank the cards from most often thought of to least, we would have:
Ace of Spades, Queen of Hearts, Ace of Hearts, King of Hearts, Jack of Spades, Ace of Diamonds, Jack of Hearts, etc.
The study goes further by comparing its results of the most thought-of cards with those indicated by Banachek in his books. It turns out that the first six cards are identical between the study (conducted under neutral conditions) and magic. This indicates that while we might sometimes think that the magical context influences the choice of cards, this is clearly not the case, and that this choice would seem to be the same, whether a person is asked to think of a card in the context of a magic trick or not.
It is also interesting to see that these are only face cards and Aces, which could, for example, allow for preparing a deck of cards in such a way as to easily access these specific cards (see the various card stacks that exist and have these properties).
