Psychology of Magic: 3 Critical Techniques

Cycling

In 2007 a group of magicians including James Randi, Teller, one half of Penn & Teller and others, gathered in Las Vegas to talk about the psychological principles they use to produce magic. Nothing unusual there, except that their audience was made up of psychologists and neuroscientists attending 'The Magic of Consciousness Symposium' organised by the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.

The aim of this collaboration between magicians and psychologists was to help uncover new ways of investigating human thought and behaviour. Now two articles on the psychology of magic have been published in prestigious academic journals. In one paper in Nature Neuroscience the magicians, with the help of academics Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde explain the psychological principles magicians use. In the other, appearing in Trends in Cognitive Science, Dr Gustav Kuhn, points to how magician's techniques can be used by psychologists to develop new avenues of research.

Psychologists are interested in the principles of magic because magicians have been carrying out informal behavioural experiments on people for centuries and have built up a huge array of techniques - many psychological - to create their mind-bending effects. Tricks often rely on manipulating people's expectations, misdirecting their attention and subtly influencing decision-making - all the kinds of things that intrigue psychologists.

While physical misdirection, physical illusions and physical 'forcing' (see number 3 below) are well-known magical techniques, less is known about their psychological counterparts. So here are three critical psychological techniques oft-used by magicians of all types which psychologists are just beginning to explore experimentally.

1. Psychological misdirection

Physical misdirection is a well-known tool for the magician: he points at an object, a big gesture distracts, spectators fixate on a suddenly appearing dove. All are designed to distract from another movement that is vital for the trick.

Psychological misdirection is much more subtle - a good example is the false solution. This is where the magician leads spectators to believe they've worked out how the trick is done. Once this 'solution' is suggested people are much less likely to notice the clues that crop up as to how it's really done. Instead people look for confirmation that their own theory is correct. When the magician finally shows this 'solution' is no such thing, spectators are left even more bemused. The false solution is, therefore, not just a happy coincidence, it is used as a distraction from the real solution.

Research in problem solving shows that once we have one solution in mind, it is very difficult to consider alternatives. Something like this effect is a common occurrence when, for example, we're trying to remember the name of a particular actor and get the wrong one 'stuck' in our head. We know it's not Christian Bale, but we can't seem to get his name out of our heads so we can remember who it really was.

A recent study by Dr Gustav Kuhn of York University and colleagues has examined a very simple use of misdirection in the vanishing ball trick. This is where the magician throws a ball into the air three times, but on the third occasion it disappears. Dr Kuhn, a practicing magician, is shown demonstrating the trick in this clip:



In reality the magician has palmed the ball on the third throw but still looks upwards as though expecting to see the ball in flight. The spectators follow the magicians social cue and look up as well.

Dr Kuhn's study found that it's this social cue of looking upwards that has a huge part to play on whether this simple trick works or not. Around two-thirds of observers said they saw the ball actually moving upwards when the magician looked up. But, in another condition when the magician continued to look at his hand only about one-third thought they saw the ball moving upwards.

2. Cognitive illusions

Many an elephant, aeroplane or major landmark has been disappeared with the use of physical illusions: smoke and mirrors or other hardware techniques. But magicians also use mental illusions which can fool our attention or play with the way we predict the future.

Research suggests that it takes about a tenth of a second from information arriving in the brain to its conscious perception. Living a tenth of a second in the past is potentially deadly so we seem to get around this lag by 'predicting the present'. Even before incoming stimuli are fully processed our brains are trying to work out what is going in the 'future', i.e. right now.

Our automatic predicting of the future is often used by magicians to trick us. The most common example is where a coin is made to disappear after it is apparently passed from one hand to the other, when it has in fact been palmed. Because the mind is already working ahead, assuming the coin has been passed to the other hand, it's as though it has disappeared when the other hand is revealed to be empty.

Cognitive illusions can also rely on manipulating our attention. It is incredible what changes we will miss if our attention is directed elsewhere. The classic example is Simons & Chabris' (1999) study in which many people fail to notice a man walking right across their field of vision in a gorilla suit (see also: choice blindness). An elegant demonstration of this effect has been produced by another magician/psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman - watch the video below. It starts off as a boring trick, but hold on until half-way through for the punch-line.



Psychologists have begun to probe the reasons why we're so poor at spotting such obvious changes like this. One theory is that it mostly depends on where we happen to be looking at any given moment. To test this, research by Dr Kuhn and colleagues has used eye-tracking technology to map out exactly where participants are looking while they are watching a magic trick.

Their results show that the trick works not because our eyes don't happen to be looking in the right direction, but because our attention is directed elsewhere. Surprisingly psychologists have found that exactly where we're looking and what we're paying attention to can be two different things. In this study even participants who were looking directly at the area where the deception was being perpetrated often didn't 'see' the deception, because their attention was directed elsewhere. It seems where we're looking isn't as important as what we're paying attention to.

3. Mental forcing

At its least sophisticated physical forcing is asking a spectator to pick a card from a special pack containing 52 aces of spades. Obviously the ace of spades can't be avoided. But magicians consider this inelegant and prefer to use mental forcing to create their effects.

A more subtle, psychological, version of forcing involves giving a spectator the impression that they have a free choice from all 52 cards, but actually use some technique to expose them to the ace of spades for longer than the other cards, thereby influencing their decision. The spectator is then put under pressure to answer quickly but, at the same time the free choice is still emphasised. In fact the 'free choice' was no such thing at all. Professor Richard Wiseman demonstrates, but with a twist in the tail:



This is why magicians spend so much time emphasising to spectators how free their choice was. Magicians are effectively trying to rewrite spectators' vague memories of being implicitly influenced and under pressure with the idea that their choice was completely of their own volition.

It turns out that magicians are much better at mental forcing than psychologists who have often recorded only modest effects in laboratory conditions.

Find out more...

Psychologists have only just begun to use magician's techniques in the laboratory and they clearly still have much to learn.

If you're interested in learning more about magician's psychological techniques the complete Nature Neuroscience article is currently available online. You can also download videos from the 'The Magic of Consciousness Symposium' of presentations given by Teller, Apollo Robbins, The Amazing Randi, Mac King and The Great Tomsoni via Susana Martinez-Conde's site.

Here is Teller's very entertaining presentation which has been uploaded to YouTube. And if you're not used to seeing him actually talking (he's resolutely mute during his act) you may find it weird to begin with!


Superstitious? Why Even Rational People Hate to Tempt Fate


Opening umbrellas indoors - why do even the most rational people have superstitious instincts?
Put your rational hat on, if you will, and consider these questions:
  • Will leaving your umbrella at home make it more likely to rain?
  • Can simply pointing out an athlete's run of success, 'jinx' them?
  • Does swapping your lottery ticket make you less likely to win the jackpot?

My head gives me the same answer to all these questions: no. I don't believe in fate so it's not possible to tempt it. And yet I get a muffled message - call it instinct or call it superstition - from the depths of my mind about how deeply I would regret it if it did actually rain, my team lost or my (old) ticket won the lottery. It would be as though I had tempted the gods and been punished for my arrogance.

Psychologists Jane Risen and Thomas Gilovich were intrigued by just how many otherwise rational people seem to hold superstitious beliefs, and what causes them. In their new research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, they wanted to find out if people really do believe that negative outcomes tend to follow actions that tempt fate. And, if so, what psychological processes are responsible for this strange superstition. Could it be that both rationality and instinct have some role to play?

Do people believe they shouldn't tempt fate?

First Risen and Gilovich wanted to see whether a (presumably) reasonably intelligent bunch of Cornell University students thought tempting fate was bad luck. Sixty-two students were approached randomly on campus and told about a scenario where a fictional 'Jon' had applied to Stanford University. Jon's mother, being confident in his ability, sends him a Stanford t-shirt. Participants then read either one of these two endings to the story:
  1. Jon wears it while he's waiting for the decision from Stanford, thereby tempting fate (gods are angered).
  2. Jon stuffs the t-shirt in the drawer, not tempting fate (gods are mollified).

Participants were asked to rate his chances of being offered a place on a scale of 1 to 10. People told he'd stuffed the t-shirt in the drawer responded that his chances were an average of 6 out of 10 - seems reasonable given there's little other information provided. But when Jon tempted fate people only rated his chances at 5 out of 10, a full point lower.

On average, then, this sample of Cornell University students believed tempting fate can increase the chances of a negative outcome. This is surprising given that these students probably consider themselves intelligent and rational human beings.

Nevertheless a second experiment backed up this finding with a further 120 students. It also tested an alternative explanation for the results: that participants were not reporting what they thought would happen, but what they wanted to happen. No support was found for this alternative explanation suggesting participants really were displaying superstitious attitudes.

Are negative outcomes more accessible?

Next Risen and Gilovich wanted to find out the reason for people's superstitious behaviour. They thought it might be because negative outcomes come to mind very easily.

To test this a further 211 participants were shown the start of 12 stories in some of which people tempted fate, and in others they didn't. They were then shown the ending of these stories and asked to indicate as quickly as possible whether it was 'logical'. Half of the stories were not logical - for example the main character changed or the topic was completely different - while the other half were logical.

Whether or not the endings were logical, though, was a bit of a red herring for the participants. The experimenters weren't so much interested in people getting the answer right, but in how quickly they did so. Risen and Gilovich thought that if negative outcomes were more accessible when people tempted fate, then participants should correctly respond more quickly to those scenarios in which negative outcomes did actually follow tempting fate.

And that's exactly what they found. When people saw the outcome which didn't 'punish' the characters in the story for tempting fate, they were slower to respond by almost half a second. This suggested the negative outcome was more accessible so that participants were quicker to respond when the characters had tempted fate.

A further study confirmed that there was a causal link between people thinking negative outcomes were more likely and their accessibility.

A battle between rationality and intuition

In many ways these are strange findings. In an age when many of us claim to be rational and free of superstition, it seems we still have some quite mysterious and irrational beliefs about how the universe works. This naturally raises the question of what is going on here.

So, in a final study the experimenters examined the psychological process that might be responsible for this connection between tempting fate and negative outcomes. They hypothesised that the connection is due to automatic, associative processes which occur outside of conscious awareness. These instinctually create the link between tempting fate and negative outcomes.

To test this idea they carried out an experiment similar to those before. This time, though, in some conditions participants were placed under 'cognitive load' (i.e. they were given something else effortful to do at the same time). The results showed that when under cognitive load people were even more likely to behave as though tempting fate leads to negative outcomes.

The experimenters argue that they successfully disrupted the rational, deliberate thinking processes which were trying to tell participants that tempting fate is superstitious rubbish. Consequently people were more likely to rely on their intuition - but it's these fast automatic processes which tend to conjure up negative visions of the future, make people superstitious. In effect the extra task they were given limited their ability to think rationally and override their superstitious instincts.

Cognitive processing: fast versus slow

This explanation of the roots of superstition is built on the now popular idea in psychology that many cognitive processes run at two levels:
  • Associative processing: a fast, parallel processing mode characterised by spreading activation based on memory. This type of processing occurs outside focal awareness.
  • Reasoning: a slow, serial type of processing that occurs within focal awareness and requires an active effort.

Our superstitions ('don't tempt fate!') come from the fast, associative, parallel processing part of the mind, while our rational, logical side comes from the (relatively) slow, deliberate processing ('come on, there's no such thing as fate!').

Rationally we know it is no more likely to rain if we don't take our umbrella, but our mind can't help reminding us how bad we'll feel if we tempt fate.

Roots of superstition

What this research demonstrates beautifully is how easy it is for superstitions like tempting fate to be formed. We absorb superstitions from around us, especially vigilant for their occurrence and reinforced by any events that fit the pattern, conveniently forgetting events that don't fit. Then the fast, automatic processes of our minds automatically anticipate the regret we might feel in the future, trapping us in a reinforcing loop.

Risen and Gilovich point to the importance of culture in this process: our shared cultural imagination provides a major source of superstitions about tempting fate. But we also each have a private menagerie of superstitions, sometimes manufactured from only the tiniest fragments of personal experience.

Whatever their original source, all manner of negative events can find fertile breeding ground in our already suspicious minds. This can give even the most rational person pause for thought while the mind's rational systems work to overcome its intuitive superstition.

Given this model it's a miracle that human societies have escaped as far as they have from the age of superstition. Or perhaps we haven't come that far at all and our age-old superstitions are now just wrapped in cloaks of rationality?

Do you tempt fate?

Risen and Gilovich's study finds that being superstitious is part of being human. It seems that we can't help it, even if it only breaks through our rationality for an instant.

Do you tempt fate? I'd love to hear your thoughts, please do comment below...

» This is part of a series on the psychology of the everyday.

[Image credit: jf-sebastian]

Elevator Psychology and The London Underground

This vintage 'Candid Camera' style video of people in an elevator is a great illustration of the power of conformity. In fact the reaction of the last victim seems almost too perfect to be real:



There's actually a real-life version of this set-up on the London underground system. Most of the lifts down to the stations let people in one side and out the opposite site. But sometimes they swap it about and it is like a 'normal' lift where you get out the same side you went in.

A sign usually lights up above your head to tell you which door will open, but often only a few people notice it. So the lift veterans turn to face in the opposite direction to everyone else in the lift.

Sometimes if enough people turn confidently then almost everyone will follow. More often, though, only one or two turn around and this causes confusion. People start edging round like the first guy in the video, unsure whether they should follow this apparently confident, grizzled lift-rider, or stick with the pack.

It usually ends up with people facing in all sorts of random directions until finally, with an almost audible sigh of relief, the doors open and the tension is released.

Compared to this video in which it's four people moving in unison to influence one person, real life is often much more ambiguous, hence the less reliable results.

Six Degrees of Separation: Do We Really Live in a 'Small World'?


Six degrees of separation? Online maybe, but not necessarily offline.
Arguments about the interconnectedness of human society have received a shot in the arm with the publication of a new study of 30 billion instant messaging conversations between 240 million people around the world.

Microsoft researchers claim their results support Milgram's idea that each of us is only 'six degrees of separation' away from anyone else on the planet.1

It was back in the 1960s that social psychologist Stanley Milgram found that he could send a letter to a random person in Nebraska or Boston and have it reach a random target person in Massachusetts.

The letter asked the first random receiver to forward it to someone who might be more likely to know the target person, but it had to be someone they were on first-name terms with. So, for example, if the first recipient, who lived in Nebraska, knew anyone at all in Massachusetts, they would send it to them. Then on and on it would go until it reached the target.

Milgram found that on average it would take 5.2 intermediaries for his letter to go from the first person to its destination, via each person's social network.

Six degrees of Kevin Bacon and Paul Erdos

Milgram took this study, along with other research, to demonstrate that we really do live in a small world. Milgram's work eased itself into the popular imagination with it's optimistic message that each of us is only a few social steps away from everyone else in the world.

The theory inspired the trivia game 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon' in which participants try to link any given actor back to an appearance with Kevin Bacon in as few moves as possible. Mathematicians also have a version in which they trace each other back to the eccentric Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos through shared publications.

Milgram's work has been challenged, though, by Professor Judith Kleinfeld who found, when re-examining Milgram's work, that there were problems with his method. For example he used relatively prominent people in society as the start and end points for his chain letter, plus a very high percentage of letters never arrived at their destination at all. Subsequent replications of Milgram's work are also few and far between and don't test links across class or geographical boundaries.

Kleinfeld points out that Milgram's claim for the six-degrees of separation could be an academic myth. Real life is probably not as incestuous as the worlds of actors or mathematicians.

Small world of email

In 2003, though, some support for Milgram's idea was found by Duncan Watts and colleagues at Columbia University, in a paper published in Science. Emailers were asked to try and forward a message to one of 18 target people in 13 different countries, going via their friends and acquaintances. All together more than 60,000 people took part. They found that successful chains were completed in between 5 and 7 steps, similar to Milgram's results.

Unfortunately this email replication had the same problem as Milgram's original study - many chains simply broke down. Also, like Milgram's study, the targets were relatively visible in society, one was a vet, another a policeman, another a technology consultant. Where are the factory operatives or convenience store workers in this sample?

New study: 6.6 degrees of separation

But a new study carried out by Leskovec and Horvitz for Microsoft Research addresses some of these points since they used data that cuts across geographical and class boundaries. They analysed data collected by Microsoft from 30 billion instant messages sent around the world in one month in 2006.

Examining this data - the largest social network ever analysed - they found that the average number of hops between any two instant messenger users was 6.6 - slightly higher than Milgram's finding.

Leskovec and Horvitz claim their work supports Milgram's theory that each of us is only separated from anyone else by six jumps. The problem, though, is that it is hard to generalise from an online to an offline environment. People behave differently online than they do offline:
  • The biggest problem is Leskovec and Horvitz's assumption that instant messaging between two people can be considered a marker of a relationship. For example, I speak to the postman but he's not really part of my social network - certainly not in the sense Milgram meant. The data is likely to over-estimate how much instant messaging between two people can be considered a marker of a 'relationship'.
  • A related problem is that people are more disinhibited online. They are more likely to say or do what they want rather than feel social pressure to keep quiet or conform. Consequently people may be more likely to talk online to people through instant messenger that in the real world they wouldn't. This could easily inflate online social networks.

These are just a couple of the main problems - others include a skew towards younger people and the data, by its very nature, only taking into account more highly developed, computer-literate groups in society.

Small world?

There are all sorts of reasons that we may want to believe Milgram's small world conclusions, as Kleinfeld herself points out. If we really are so easily connected to others our lives seem less isolated, cold and forbidding.

Both Milgram's and Watts and colleagues' studies seem to support the small world theory but it is hard to draw solid conclusions when so many chains of communication broke down in both studies. It's difficult to know whether these chains were broken because of apathy or because the messages reached a cul-de-sac in a social network.

It's probably over-stretching the new research by Leskovec and Horvitz to claim it supports Milgram's idea of six (or seven) degrees of separation in the offline world. We'll have to wait for an equivalent offline study before we can truly say it is a small world. Until then we'll have to be content with playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (and Paul Erdos for mathematicians) which rely on much more intimate social networks.


Notes
1Milgram himself never used the phrase 'six degrees of separation'.

[Image credit: social d]

7 Myths of Crowd Psychology

Crowd

"The mass, whether it be a crowd or an army, is vile"
~Benito Mussolini

How do you imagine an archetypal crowd of people - say at a concert, a sporting event or a demonstration?

If you picture an irrational, spontaneous, suggestible, emotional and even potentially dangerous group then you are in good company.

Sociologists David Schweingruber and Ronald Wohlstein have found this view of crowds is promoted by many authors of introductory sociology textbooks. Indeed the idea that crowds demonstrate bizarre, almost pathological behaviour was championed by eminent French sociologist Gustave LeBon.

Despite these beliefs both in sociology textbooks and in the general public, the actual evidence does not support it. Crowds are not the many-armed destructive monsters of the popular or even fascist imagination.

Here are the seven myths about crowds that Schweingruber and Wohlstein identify, in order of how frequently they appear in introductory sociology textbooks.

1. Crowds are spontaneous

The most common myth about crowds is that they are spontaneous, or worse, that they are hotbeds of violence, with complete chaos only a few ill-judged jostles away.

Research into crowd violence does not support this. One study of riots shows that violence is normally related to the presence of two opposing factions. Mixed crowds - which are the norm - are in fact usually peaceful and only engage in stereotypical crowd-behaviour, e.g. whistling and clapping, face-painting, singing and shouting depending on the occasion.

In reality most people will go to almost any length to avoid actual violence, whether they are in a crowd or not.

2. Crowds are suggestible

The idea that people in crowds have heightened suggestibility is also a relatively common myth. People are said to copy each other, looking for a leader, being open to others' suggestion about how they should behave, perhaps resulting from a lack of social structure.

Schweingruber and Wohlstein simply find no research to back up this claim. If there is some truth to the idea that people in crowds are suggestible, no one has managed to demonstrate it empirically. One scholar has asked why, if crowds are so suggestible, they don't disperse when asked to do so by an authority figure.

3. Crowds are irrational

One type of irrationality frequently attributed to crowds is panic. Faced by emergency situations people are thought to suddenly behave like selfish animals, trampling others in the scramble to escape.

A long line of research into the way people behave in real emergency situations does not support this idea. Two examples are studies on underground station evacuations and the rapid, orderly way in which people evacuated the World Trade Center after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Many lives were saved that day because people resisted the urge to panic. Resisting the urge to irrationality, or panic, is the norm.

4. Crowds increase anonymity

A less common myth, but still popular is the idea that people become more anonymous when they are in a crowd. This anonymity is said to feed into spontaneity and even destructiveness, helping to make crowds violent, dangerous places in which society's laws are transgressed.

Everyday experience, though, is that people usually travel in groups, with their family or friends, and so are not anonymous at all. Research confirms this, for example one study from the 70s found that most people at a football match were with one or more friends. Later research has repeated this finding.

5. Crowds are emotional

Less widespread this myth - nevertheless crowds are thought by some to be particularly emotional. It is argued that increased emotionality is linked to irrationality and perhaps violence.

Modern psychological research, though, doesn't see the emotions as separate to decision-making, but rather as an integral part. To talk about an 'emotional crowd' as opposed to a 'rational crowd', therefore, doesn't make sense. People in crowds make their decisions with input from their emotions, just as they do when they're not in a crowd.

6. Crowds are unanimous

Few of the sociology textbooks endorse the myth of unanimity, but the idea does appear that when people are together they tend to act in unison. Research suggests, though, that this is rarely the case - people remain stubbornly individual.

7. Crowds are destructive

The least common myth in the sociology textbooks, but quite a strong cultural stereotype of crowds, is that they are destructive. This is closely related to the myth of spontaneity and is often connected to violence.

Again Schweingruber and Wohlstein find that the research (like this) shows violence in crowds is extremely rare. And what violence does occur is normally carried out by a small minority - these are the people that make it onto the news.

What do you think?

Crowds obviously vary greatly, but this myth-busting portrayal of crowds certainly agrees with my experience. I assumed all the violent, despotic, spontaneous, dangerous crowds on TV and in films must be elsewhere.

What's your experience of being in a crowd or watching a crowd?

» This is part of a series on the psychology of the everyday.

[Image credit: twose]