Faraday's 1853 experiment settled the mechanical question for the table turning craze then sweeping Europe and America, but it did little to change the minds of sitters who reported, sincerely, that they had felt no exertion at all; the effect works precisely because the movement it produces is involuntary and outside conscious awareness, which is what makes an honest participant's testimony that they did not move the table compatible with the finding that their hands did. The same explanation was later extended to the Ouija board's planchette, the dowsing rod, and any other device in which a participant's hands rest lightly on an object capable of movement.
The ideomotor effect is not treated within psychology as a contested or fringe claim; it is a well replicated feature of human motor control, cited in mainstream research on hypnosis and the placebo response, and, more recently, in criticism of facilitated communication techniques used with nonverbal individuals, where investigators found that a facilitator's own ideomotor movements, not the nonverbal person's intended communication, were producing the typed messages. Within this atlas it functions chiefly as the standard skeptical counter-explanation offered wherever a psychokinetic or mediumistic claim depends on hands resting on a moving object, a category that includes table tipping, spirit board use, and dowsing alike.