Influencing choices with conversational primes: How a magic trick unconsciously influences card choices

Abstract

Past research demonstrates that unconscious primes can affect people’s decisions. However, these free choice priming paradigms present participants with very few alternatives. Magicians’ forcing techniques provide a powerful tool to investigate how natural implicit primes can unconsciously influence decisions with multiple alternatives. We used video and live performances of the mental priming force. This technique uses subtle nonverbal and verbal conversational primes to influence spectators to choose the three of diamonds. Our results show that a large number of participants chose the target card while reporting feeling free and in control of their choice. Even when they were influenced by the primes, participants typically failed to give the reason for their choice. These results show that naturally embedding primes within a person’s speech and gestures effectively influenced people’s decision making. This raises the possibility that this form of mind control could be used to effectively manipulate other mental processes.

The magician’s choice: Providing illusory choice and sense of agency with the equivoque forcing technique.

“…We previously found similar ratings of sense of control ( M = 45) in experiments using the crisscross force (Pailhès & Kuhn, 2020a) and for which participants did not understand they were manipulated. However, higher ratings were found in our research using the position force technique ( M = 82; Pailhès & Kuhn, 2020b). Contrary to the position force, both the equivoque and the crisscross are outcomes forces, in which the magician physically intervenes during the trick.…”

“…These Decision forces encompass a large number of techniques in which magicians covertly influence spectators' decision, and several of these techniques have been empirically investigated. For example, people can be covertly influenced by the positioning of a card among others (Kuhn, Pailhès, & Lan, 2020;Pailhès & Kuhn, 2020b), the timing on which cards are handled by the magician, subtly pushing the target card when the spectator's fingers are reaching the deck to take one (Shalom et al, 2013), the visual saliency of the target card (Olson, Amlani, Raz, & Rensink, 2015), or even subtle gestures that prime a specific card (Pailhès & Kuhn, 2020a). It is important to note that whilst many of these techniques are highly effective, there is no guarantee that they will work.…”

Mind Control Tricks: Magicians’ Forcing and Free Will

“…For instance, the magician gestures a Diamond shape while asking participants to imagine a screen in their mind, or quickly draws little 3s in the air while asking them to imagine the numbers on the card. This force has been shown to be effective for 18% of participants, when we would expect less than 2% by chance [9].…”

“…Forcing techniques provide powerful tools to investigate illusory sense of agency and freedom over choices. Empirical research using magicians' forces indeed shows that participants report high feelings of freedom and control over their choice, even though they ended up with the predetermined target card or object [4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. Moreover, when asked to explain the reason for their choice, most participants confabulated reasons which were unrelated to the influences exerted by the magician [7,9].…”

“…Here, the magician, uses both verbal and nonverbal primes, to prime the spectator to name the target object. The Mental Priming force, created by British mentalist Derren Brown, relies on using subtle hand gestures and key words to prime people to think of the three of Diamonds [9]. In this force, the magician declares that they will try to mentally transmit the identity of a playing card, and then asks them to follow some instructions while imagining different things.…”