conjuring

For more information on conjuring, visit Britannica.com.

To conjure originally meant to call up spirits or practice magic arts, but in the course of time a secondary meaning of sleight of hand displaced the earlier meaning, and the term now indicates trickery or deception (usually for entertainment). In the United States, the term magic is usually used for conjuring, although this too originally had an occult meaning. The blurring of the occult and stage magic occurred in the late nineteenth century when so many mediums passed off stage illusions as genuine Spiritualist phenomena.

Sources:

Evans, Henry Ridgeley. The Old and New Magic. Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1909.

For over 100 years psychologists have been fascinated by the techniques employed by magicians to fool their audiences. In the 1890s both Alfred Binet and Max Dessoir wrote short articles about the ways in which magicians divert attention and use suggestion to accomplish their illusions. In 1896, Joseph Jastrow published an article in Science reporting the results of several psychological tests (including, for example, those concerned with reaction time, speed of hand movement, short-term memory, etc.) that he had carried out with two of America's best-known stage magicians. In 1900, Norman Triplett completed the first American Ph.D. in psychology on 'The psychology of conjuring deceptions', and described several experiments investigating the effect of suggestion on the perception and recall of magic tricks (Triplett 1900).

Throughout the last century, a small number of psychologists have continued to investigate the topic, with the most recent work involving experimental investigations into mechanisms that lie behind the stratagems used by magicians (see, for example, Wiseman and Morris 1995).

However, the vast majority of the literature on the psychology of conjuring has been produced by magicians in an attempt to enhance the performance of their art (see, for example, Fitzkee 1945 and Lamont and Wiseman 1999 for a review and bibliography).

This article presents a summary of some of the main topics discussed by those who have attempted to understand the psychology behind this highly unusual, and captivating, form of deception.

1. Effects and methods
2. Misdirection of attention
3. Reducing suspicion
4. Biasing recall
5. Problem solving
6. The psychology of mind-reading
7. Summary

1. Effects and methods

Magicians appear to defy the laws of physics by making rabbits appear, handkerchiefs disappear, and people levitate. These seemingly impossible feats are referred to as 'effects', and are achieved through a wide range of 'methods'. For example, imagine that the magician places a ball into a box, says a few magic words, and opens the box to reveal that the ball has disappeared. The trick could have been accomplished in several ways. For example, the ball may be made of foam and squashed into a small hidden compartment inside the box, or the magician may only appear to place the ball in the box while actually concealing it in his hand. The magician's job is to conceal these methods from the audience, and the psychological techniques used to achieve this are commonly referred to as 'misdirection'. This article will describe some of the main forms of misdirection.

2. Misdirection of attention

Let us imagine that the spectator chooses a playing card, looks at it, and places it into the middle of the deck. The magician intends to perform some simple sleight of hand that will result in the playing card being transferred from the centre to the top of the deck. However, for the secret transfer to go unnoticed, the magician has to direct the audience's attention away from the deck of cards for a few seconds. This could be accomplished in one of several ways. The magician may look at the spectator and ask him to name the card. The few seconds of eye contact between spectator and magician will be enough to hide the sleight of hand involved in the trick. Alternatively, the magician may look at another deck of cards on a table and ask the spectator to pick them up. Again, for a few seconds the spectator's attention will be directed away from the magician's hands and thus he will be able to transfer the position of the chosen card undetected. Both of the strategies described above depend upon the social reciprocation of attention. As John Ramsey, a highly accomplished magician, once remarked, 'If you want somebody to look at something, look at it. If you want somebody to look at you, look at them.'

Another form of misdirecting attention involves exploiting naturally occurring moments when spectators are unlikely to be concentrating on events. One common technique involves the magician carrying out secret preparations for a trick prior to the perceived start of the performance. For example, the magician may look at, and remember, the order of certain cards in a deck while appearing to casually toy with them prior to the start of a trick.

In short, magicians have developed several techniques for manipulating attention and exploiting naturally occurring moments of inattention. Interestingly, for these to be fully effective, the audience must be unaware that their attention has been misdirected, and thus the magician must work without recourse to the types of direct requests (e.g. 'look over there' or 'look at this') used to direct attention during many everyday interactions.

3. Reducing suspicion

Let us imagine that the magician has borrowed a coin, pretended to place it into his left fist, but, in reality, concealing it in his right hand. He now wishes to secretly transfer the coin from his right hand to his inside jacket pocket. Obviously, the magician could simply place his right hand into his pocket and drop the coin. However, most spectators are extremely suspicious of any actions that seem to occur for no apparent reason. To reduce this suspicion, the magician needs to manufacture a reason for placing his hand into his jacket pocket. This could be achieved in several ways. For example, prior to the trick, the magician might place a magic wand into his pocket. During the trick, he could then explain that he now needs the wand, and therefore create a logical reason to place his hand inside his jacket, remove the wand, and, at the same time, drop the coin into his pocket.

Magicians frequently disguise an otherwise suspicious action by creating a 'natural' reason for the action. Such 'naturalness' is central to the performance of magic, and magicians have developed many other stratagems for reducing the amount of suspicion with which spectators view trick objects and deceptive actions. For example, magicians are aware that everyday objects, such as decks of playing cards and coins, are unlikely to arouse suspicion, and thus modify such objects (e.g. creating double headed coins or decks containing 52 identical cards) with little risk of detection.

4. Biasing recall

After a trick has been performed the audience will often try to reconstruct the sequence of events and figure out the secret of the trick. Magicians have developed several stratagems to disrupt this process. During a trick the magician may attempt to influence the spectator's subsequent memory for events. For example, let us imagine that the magician is performing a trick in which a deck of cards has been secretly placed into a known order. The magician will be able to cut the cards without seriously disrupting their order. However, shuffling the cards would result in a completely different order, thus rendering the trick impossible. During the performance the magician may cut the deck of cards. However, a few minutes later he may state that the cards were actually shuffled. After the trick has finished, the audience are likely to incorrectly reconstruct the trick on the basis of the magician's remark, believe that the cards were shuffled, rule out the possibility of the cards being in a certain order, and thus be unable to figure out how the trick was achieved.

5. Problem solving

On occasion, the audience may figure out the correct solution to a trick, but reject it as implausible. For example, the magician may have used a powerful mnemonic technique to quickly remember the entire order of a shuffled deck of cards. However, the audience may believe that such a memory feat is impossible, or that the magician would not go to such lengths to perform the trick, and thus reject the idea as implausible. At other times the spectator may simply not think of the correct solution in the first place. This might be the case when a trick depends upon clever lateral thinking, or some form of scientific/mathematical principle not known to the spectator. For example, one very simple trick involves a spectator thinking of a number, doubling it, adding four, dividing by two, then subtracting the number he first thought of, and always being left with the number two. A spectator who was unaware of the basic mathematical principles involved in the calculations might be fooled by this trick. Likewise, spectators unaware of mirrors, projections, and esoteric chemical reactions might be fooled by those tricks that rely on such methods.

6. The psychology of mind-reading

All of the above sections refer to magic tricks in which the performer makes objects seem to appear, disappear, transform, etc. However, there is another branch of magic, usually referred to as 'mentalism', in which the performer appears to possess extrasensory perception and thus can read minds, predict the future, and so on. Although some of the principles that have already been discussed are also used in mentalism, other psychological stratagems also come into play. For example, the mentalist may appear to be able to see into the future by predicting the probable. Let us imagine that the performer places four cards, numbered one, two, three, and four, in a row and asks a spectator to select one of them. The spectator selects number two and the mentalist opens his prediction to reveal the statement 'I predict that you will choose number two'. This prediction is likely to be correct as most people will avoid the end positions and choose number two or number three.

At other times, the mentalist will appear to predict the future by making several predictions, but only revealing the one prediction that conforms to some future event. For example, let us imagine that the mentalist asks a spectator to name blue, green, or red. The spectator names 'red', and the mentalist removes a piece of paper from his pocket on which is written 'I predict that you will choose red'. In reality, the mentalist wrote down three statements on three pieces of paper in advance of the trick. Each statement predicted that the spectator would choose a different colour, and each piece of paper was hidden in a different pocket. During the trick, the mentalist simply revealed the prediction that matched the spectator's choice.

7. Summary

Many of the forefathers of modern psychology recognized the potential benefits of studying magic and conjuring. Magicians have classified many different forms of misdirection and have written about the ways in which they can be used to enhance the performance of magic (see e.g. Fitzkee 1945, Tamariz, 1988). Recent investigations by psychologists have provided additional insights into these techniques (see, for example, Wiseman and Morris 1995).

This work has resulted in an understanding of many of the methods used by magicians to deceive their audiences. However, modern experimental tools, such as devices designed to track eye movements and video analysis, could unlock a great deal more information about the ways in which magicians manipulate and misdirect attention, perception, memory, and problem solving. Such information has the potential to inform a wide range of psychological enquiry and may also shed light onto other important areas of deception, including, for example, military deception, financial fraud, and confidence games.

(Published 2004)

— Richard Wiseman

Bibliography
• Fitzkee, D. (1945). Magic by Misdirection.
• Lamont, P., and Wiseman, R. (1999). Magic In Theory.
• Tamariz, J. (1988). The Magic Way.
• Triplett, N. (1900). 'The psychology of conjuring deception'. American Journal of Psychology, 11/4.
• Wiseman, R., and Morris, R. (1995). 'Recalling pseudo-psychic demonstrations'. British Journal of Psychology, 86.

---