Study reveals the science behind magic
Decision-making influences seen in magician’s tricks
A good magician never reveals his tricks, but that hasn’t stopped Jay Olson from trying to understand the science behind them.
Mr. Olson, 28, a professional magician and graduate student at McGill University, is the lead author of a study that explores the psychological factors that make card tricks work. The goal was to learn how outside factors influence decision-making.
“Magicians usually know the secret, but they don’t know the psychology behind the magic trick,” said Mr. Olson, who is in McGill’s psychiatry program.
For the first part of the study, published in the journal Consciousness and Cog
nition, he performed a card trick on 118 people. The trick is simple: The magician flips through a deck of cards and asks the subject to pick a card, intentionally showing one card for longer than the rest.
A whopping 98% of participants ended up choosing the target card, in this case a 10 of hearts. Imagine their amazement when they were subsequently told to look at the box the cards came in, and read the bar code, which included the letters “Ten of Heart.”
The research also found that 91% of people felt they had picked the target card of their own free will.
“What we found is that people often wouldn’t know why they chose their cards. When I asked them why, they came up with plausible but incorrect reasons,” Mr. Olson said. “One person claimed she chose the card because 10 is a high value and that she was thinking of hearts before the trick started.”
For the second part of the study, subjects participated in a computer simulation of the trick — avoiding the social factors that magicians use to persuade people. Participants chose the target card only 30% of the time. A tap on the arm, rushing people and using expectations make persuasion more effective, Mr. Olson said.
The study, co-authored by Ronald Rensink, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, Amir Raz, a neuroscientist at McGill, and Alym Amlani, an accounting instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, B.C., has practical uses that go beyond magic.
For example: deciding what to order off a menu. Mr. Olson said people are more likely to order an item off the top or bottom of a menu than from the middle. “The thought is that the items from the top and bottom are slightly more salient, a little more attentiongrabbing in people’s memories, so people choose those items without knowing why,” he said.
“The hope is that the same kind of principles that influence people in magic can also explain some of the decisions we make throughout the day,” he said.
Mr. Olson started doing magic at age five and performing at age seven. He still performs professionally, mostly at corporate events.
He said it was during a psychology course he took while completing his bachelor’s degree at Simon Fraser University, that he realized that many of the concepts he was being taught were similar to the basic principles of magic.