Forcing you to experience wonder: Unconsciously biasing people’s choice through strategic physical positioning

Kuhn, Gustav; Pailhès, Alice; Lan, Yong

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2020.102902

Cited by 16 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Furthermore, some magic tricks force the spectators to choose a certain object while the spectators believe that they made the choice out of their free will. Investigating how and why spectators have such false beliefs can lead to better understanding of human free will and agency (Kuhn, Pailhès, & Lan, 2020;Olson, Amlani, & Rensink, 2013;Ozono, 2017;. Our magic trick videos include misdirection, illusion, and forcing as well as other various trick mechanisms (e.g., tricks utilizing mathematical logic or physical principles), allowing researchers to pursue a variety of psychological research questions.…”

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confidence: 99%

Magic Curiosity Arousing Tricks (MagicCATs): A novel stimulus collection to induce epistemic emotions

et al. 2020

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There has been considerable interest in empirical research on epistemic emotions, i.e., emotions related to knowledge-generating qualities of cognitive tasks and activities such as curiosity, interest, and surprise. One big challenge when studying epistemic emotions is systematically inducting these emotions in restricted experimental settings. The current study created a novel stimulus set called Magic Curiosity Arousing Tricks (MagicCATs): a collection of 166 short magic trick video clips that aim to induce a variety of epistemic emotions. MagicCATs are freely available for research and can be used in a variety of ways to examine epistemic emotions. Rating data also support that the magic tricks elicit a variety of epistemic emotions with sufficient inter-stimulus variability, demonstrating good psychometric properties for their use in psychological experiments. Keywords intrinsic motivation. epistemic emotions. curiosity. science of magic Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the topic of socalled epistemic emotions. Epistemic emotions refer to a group of emotions which are related to the knowledgegenerating qualities of cognitive tasks and activities (Brun, Doğuoğlu, & Kuenzle, 2008; Muis, Chevrier, & Singh, 2018). These emotions typically include surprise, curiosity and interest. Recent studies have revealed that these epistemic emotions have profound implications for cognitive processing * Hiroki Ozono

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confidence: 99%

Magic Curiosity Arousing Tricks (MagicCATs): A novel stimulus collection to induce epistemic emotions

et al. 2020

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“…Other authors have already described a positional bias influencing choice using everyday objects, but in this case, the selected position is the first, not the second, from the right (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). Kuhn, Pailhès & Yuxuan (2020), suggest that this preference for the second position is caused by a similar positional bias towards the card that it is easiest to reach from the point of view of the spectator. However, in magic shows, sometimes the magician deals the cards on the table at a slant, if the positional bias was the only responsible for people's choices, the selected card in this case would be the one closest to the spectator, that is, the first one from the right.…”

Section: Intuitive Decisions (Forces Manipulating Decisions)mentioning

confidence: 61%

On the cognitive bases of illusionism

Camı́

Gomez‐Marin

Martı́nez

2020

PeerJ

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Cognitive scientists have paid very little attention to magic as a distinctly human activity capable of creating situations that are considered impossible because they violate expectations and conclude with the apparent transgression of well-established cognitive and natural laws. This illusory experience of the “impossible” entails a very particular cognitive dissonance that is followed by a subjective and complex “magical experience”. Here, from a perspective inspired by visual neuroscience and ecological cognition, we propose a set of seven fundamental cognitive phenomena (from attention and perception to memory and decision-making) plus a previous pre-sensory stage that magicians interfere with during the presentation of their effects. By doing so, and using as an example the deconstruction of a classic trick, we show how magic offers novel and powerful insights to study human cognition. Furthermore, live magic performances afford to do so in tasks that are more ecological and context-dependent than those usually exploited in artificial laboratory settings. We thus believe that some of the mysteries of how the brain works may be trapped in the split realities present in every magic effect.

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“…These results were truly unexpected and confirm that magicians do not always know why their tricks work. Our previous research ( Kuhn et al, 2020 ) has shown that magicians are good at estimating the effectiveness of a force, but their intuitions about its mechanism are not necessarily correct. A more scientific approach to the art of magic can illustrate why their tricks work, which in turn might help them develop more refined and more powerful deceptive principles ( Kuhn, 2019 ; Rensink & Kuhn, 2015 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Let us now take a closer look at these two types of forces. Choice forces refer to techniques in which the magician covertly influences a person’s choice, and several of these techniques have been empirically investigated ( Kuhn et al, 2020 ). Shalom and colleagues studied the “Classic Force,” which involves asking a spectator to choose a card by physically picking it.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The apparent action causation: Using a magician forcing technique to investigate our illusory sense of agency over the outcome of our choices

Pailhès

Kuhn

2020

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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We often fall victim of an illusory sense of control and agency over our thoughts and actions. Magicians are masters at exploiting these illusions, and forcing techniques provide a powerful way to study apparent action causation—the illusion that our action caused the outcome we get. In this article, we used the Criss-Cross force to study whether people can tell the difference between an action which had an impact on the outcome they get and one which has no impact. In the Criss-Cross force, participants are asked to cut to a card, and while they are genuinely free to cut the cards at any position, the cut does not affect the card they are given (i.e., they always get the top card). We investigate the psychological processes that underpin the success of this force. Experiment 1 ( N = 60) showed that participants cannot tell the difference between a forced and a controlled outcome. Experiment 2 ( N = 90) showed that contrary to common magicians’ knowledge, misdirection does not play a role in the success of the force. Finally, Experiment 3 ( N = 60) suggests that rather than misdirection, an attribute substitution error explains why people fail to understand that their action does not have an impact on the outcome they get. Debriefing also shows the importance of participants’ expectations in the perception of the trick, as well as the role of prediction of the outcome in participants’ sense of agency over the events.

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Forcing you to experience wonder: Unconsciously biasing people’s choice through strategic physical positioning

Cited by 16 publications

References 24 publications

Magic Curiosity Arousing Tricks (MagicCATs): A novel stimulus collection to induce epistemic emotions

Magic Curiosity Arousing Tricks (MagicCATs): A novel stimulus collection to induce epistemic emotions

On the cognitive bases of illusionism

The apparent action causation: Using a magician forcing technique to investigate our illusory sense of agency over the outcome of our choices

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