Psychology of Magic: 3 Critical Techniques

Psychologists are interested in the principles of magic because magicians have been carrying out informal behavioural experiments on people for centuries.

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’.

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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 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.

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How Beliefs and Values Influence What Tastes Good

Meat means social power and, for some, it’s the power that really tastes good.

‘Meat is murder’, or so the vegetarian’s rallying cry goes. But according to a new study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, meat also means social power, and, for some, it’s the power that really tastes good.

In this study, conducted by Michael Allen at the University of Sydney, Australia, and colleagues, participants were lied to about the contents of sausage rolls they were tasting.

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Are Boys Better Than Girls At Maths?

The widespread assumption has been that there is a difference in mathematical achievement that needs explaining.

Think back to your school days and conjure up an image of the archetypal maths-whizz: striding ahead of the rest of the class, solving problems with ease, clearly destined to be a mathematician, physicist or engineer later in life.

Chances are that person was not female, and considering how few women occupy the top spots in maths-based professions, your memory is probably accurate.

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Irritating Psychobabble: Disorders Win!

Some favourite examples of psychobabble – technical psychological terms used out of context.

Recently I asked for your (least) favourite examples of psychobabble – technical psychological terms used out of context.

You responded with many great suggestions, 30 of which I published. 750 of you (and counting) voted for your favourite and now the results are in.

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Human-Cat Psychology: Do Cats Improve Our Mood and Become Attached to Us?

Cats’ effects on human mood, their ability to become attached to their owners, their personalities and our relationships with them.

“There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.” — Albert Schweitzer

Last year I covered 5 unusual studies on the psychology of dogs and their owners. This kicked off a comment thread which discussed how dogs act as ice-breakers, how they might mediate the tension between couples and how long after you died they would wait to feast on your flesh.

Apparently dogs wait longer than cats although I’m pretty sure there’s no experimentally controlled evidence for this.

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How Infants Start the Journey to Their First Word

An infant’s very first step in their year-long journey to their first word is perhaps their most impressive.

An infant’s very first step in their year-long journey to their first word is perhaps their most impressive.

This first step is discriminating and categorising the basic sound components of the language they are hearing.

To get an idea how hard this might be think about listening to someone speaking a language you don’t understand.

Foreign languages can sound like continuous streams of noise in which it’s very hard to pick up where one word starts and another word begins.

Young infants face an analogous challenge but not initially at the level of words, but at the lower level of pure noise.

Their first struggle is to tell the difference between the most basic components of speech, the individual sounds we are making, the phonemes.

Noticing the difference between ‘b’ and ‘p’

Until a classic study carried out by Peter D Eimas and colleagues from Brown University in 1971, psychologists were not sure how soon infants could discriminate phonemes.

Eimas and colleagues’ study used infants aged between just 1 and 4 months old and tested their ability to discriminate between a ‘b’ sound and a ‘p’ sound (Eimas et al., 1971).

To get an idea of how difficult this is, consider the fact there’s only a 10ms difference in timing between the two.

To be able to hear this difference, a baby has got to have a very fine-tuned ear.

The method they used for intuiting whether the infants had noticed a change from one sound to the other was pretty ingenious.

They were hooked up to a fake nipple which measured their rate of sucking, the idea being that this was a proxy for how interested they were in what was going on around them.

The more interested, the faster they suckled.

First, infants’ suckling rates were measured while they were exposed to one repeated sound, say the ‘b’.

Initially infants found this interesting and sucked a bit faster.

Then after a while they get bored and their suckling rate reduced.

Here’s the crucial part: in some experimental conditions the sound is changed to a ‘p’, while in other conditions it continues with the same ‘b’.

The question is whether infants notice this change, as evidenced by an increased suckling rate, and thereby demonstrate that they can discriminate the tiny difference between a ‘b’ and a ‘p’ sound.

Innate ability to discriminate phonemes

What Eimas and colleagues found was that even the one-month old infants appeared to be able to tell the difference between a ‘b’ sound and a ‘p’ sound.

This findings, and more like it, suggests to many psychologists that infants are born with skills which enable them to categorise sounds that only slightly vary.

This skill is one of the basic building blocks of language learning.

Most languages contain about 40 distinct phonemes and an infant’s ultimate task is to master all of them.

During their first three months of life infants make all kinds of sound, but none of them bear much resemblance to speech.

But, partly because of this innate ability to discriminate the components of speech, by 3 months they start producing vowel-like sounds.

They’ve conquered their first few phonemes and are well on their way to their first words.

The first word

While infants seem to be born with an ear fine-tuned for language, this starts to subtly change at around 11 months of age.

Subsequent findings have shown that adults cannot successfully distinguish as wider a range of phonemes as infants.

This is because until about 11 months of age infants are masters of discriminating phonemes used in all different types of languages.

But after 11 months infants settle down with one set of phonemes for their first language, and lose the ability to discriminate the phonemes from other languages.

Infants are beginning to specialise in their own language.

The specialisation at 11 months in one set of around 40 phonemes, along with other linguistic processes, is clearly crucial as it quickly brings a magical moment: the first word.

→ This article is part of a series on 10 crucial developmental psychology studies:

  1. When infant memory develops
  2. How self-concept emerges in infants
  3. How children learn new concepts
  4. The importance of attachment styles
  5. When infants learn to imitate others
  6. Theory of mind reveals the social world
  7. Understanding object permanence
  8. How infants learn their first word
  9. The six types of play
  10. Piaget’s stages of development theory

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Better Golfers See Bigger Hole

A new study demonstrates that imagination can have a direct effect on our perception of the world.

A new study demonstrates that imagination can have a direct effect on our perception of the world. This may help explain why more accomplished sports-players describe perceiving the ball, or target such as a golf cup, as bigger.

Jessica K. Witt, an assistant professor at Purdue University, found that golfers who play well are more likely to actually see a bigger hole.

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Why Our Ideal Self Seems Further Away For Us Than Others

Understanding ourselves is partly about understanding who it is we want to become.

Understanding ourselves is partly about understanding who it is we want to become.

Because each of us is a perpetual work in progress, we live our lives with one eye on the future. In that future we see ourselves transformed into our true, ideal self – just as we would like to be.

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Psychobabble: Which Expressions Do You Love to Hate?

Sometimes respectable psychological terms escape from their cosy, sheltered academic homes and develop their ‘babble’ out in the wide world where they’re ravaged by the uncultured masses and left almost unrecognisable.

Send me your favourite examples of psychobabble and I will publish them here on PsyBlog.

My first experience of ‘psychobabble’ was at school. Kids used to shout an abusive epithet across the playground and when some poor soul turned around to look they all cried in unison, “Complex!”, as in the Freudian term ‘Oedipus complex’.

As is usually the case with psychobabble it was a technical psychological term used out of context – not that I was sufficiently well-read (or stupid enough) to point that out at the time. Continue reading “Psychobabble: Which Expressions Do You Love to Hate?”