A talk with psychologist and magician Anthony Barnhart focused on how magicians misdirect attention and manipulate an audience. Other topics include: the role blinking can play in misdirections; acts that claim to use psychology and behavior-manipulation to achieve magic-like effects (e.g., Derren Brown’s act); neuro-linguistic programming (NLP); a magic show Tony was impressed by recently and why he was impressed, and more.
Transcript is below.
Episode links:
- YouTube (includes video)
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
Resources related to or mentioned in this talk:
- Anthony’s website
- Sleights of Mind: book that Barnhart helped with
- Barnhart’s presents on “tactical blinking” in magicians
- Article on Wiseman’s analysis of magician blinks
- About Gustav Kuhn, who also works in psychology and magic
- New Yorker piece on Derren Brown
TRANSCRIPT
(Note that transcripts are not perfect and may contain errors.)
Zach: Hello and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast about understanding other people better – and also understanding ourselves beter. You can learn more about it, and sign up for a premium ad-free subscription, at www.PeopleWhoReadPeople.com.
In this episode I talk with psychologist and magician Tony Barnhart. Our main focus in this talk is how magicians misdirect attention and manipulate their audience, with a focus on some behavioral aspects of misdirection that Tony has studied. Other topics include: Neuro-linguistic Programming (known as NLP), psychics, Derren Brown and similar acts that claim to use psychology and behavior-reading to achieve amazing feats; a magic show Tony was impressed by and why he was impressed, and more.
If you want some resources related to the stuff we talk about, you can find that at the entry for this episode on my site PeopleWhoReadPeople.com.
And just a heads up that you can find transcripts for almost all my episodes on that site, too.
A little bit more about Tony, which I’ve taken from his website anthonybarnhart.com :
He’s an Associate Professor of Psychological Science at Carthage College, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He’s also a part-time professional magician with over 30 years of performing experience. His research trajectory changed in 2010 with the publication of the book Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about our Everyday Deceptions, in which he was featured as a consultant and teacher on the science of stage magic.
The scientific interest that the book garnered motivated Tony to shift his focus toward the interface of science and magic. Magicians are informal cognitive scientists with their own hypotheses about the mind. Tony’s work on the science of magic has been featured in Science News For Students as well as in national and international television appearances and documentaries. Most recently, his work was featured in an episode of The Nature of Things, Canada’s long-running science program.
Okay here’s the talk with Tony Barnhart:
Zachary Elwood: Okay, here’s the talk with Tony Barnhart.
Hi Tony, thanks for joining me.
Anthony Barnhart: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to chat.
Zach: Yeah, I appreciate it. Maybe we could start with… I know this is probably a big question, but maybe a quick summary of what drives your interest in the intersection of magic and science. How do you find yourself working in that area?
Anthony: Sure. Yeah, before I was a psychologist, I was a professional magician. I started performing when I was seven, I was doing paid gigs by my tween years and paid for college doing magic shows. So, I always had that interest. And I think magic is what drew me towards psychology in the first place. Magicians are kind of informal cognitive scientists. They have to have hypotheses about how the mind works in order to come up with ways to deceive the mind. And so there are lots of magicians who are sort of psychological hobbyists who try to read the literature and keep up with some research. I was a psychology major as an undergraduate from the very start, but I thought I wanted to be a clinician as most undergraduate psychology majors do. In fact, the best thing that ever happened to me was not getting into grad school for clinical psych my first year out of undergraduate. It made me sort of rethink my priorities a little bit. And I thought back to the work that I had done with the cognitive psychologist who worked at my undergraduate institution. I’d worked in his lab for years, he’d been the first person to sort of foster my thinking about the psychological basis of magic, I gave some of my first talks on the topic while I was an undergraduate. Thinking back on those experiences reminded me just how rich they were and how much I enjoyed thinking about magic in this way. I ended up applying to graduate school in cognitive psychology, which is an experimental type of psychology. It’s not clinical at all. I know nothing about helping people, but I can design a mean experiment. Cognitive psychologists study the building blocks of thought. So, language and memory and attention and perception, all that jazz.
So I went to graduate school to be a language researcher. Even though I’d done this thinking about magic as an undergraduate, I didn’t at that time see a basis for making magic my shtick as an experimental psychologist. But while I was in graduate school doing work on language, I started seeing other psychologists and neuroscientists publishing research that either used magic as a tool in the laboratory for studying attention and perception, or that examined hypotheses from the world of magic that had not been empirically tested to see whether they could contribute to a more formal understanding of the mind. And I thought, “There’s really nothing special about me to study language, right? I don’t have a leg up on anybody, I can read the literature just like anybody else and come up with some hypotheses, but I have all of this training as a magician that I could immediately put to use to give myself a leg up in this new burgeoning research program on the science of magic. And so I started looking at who the movers and shakers were in this new field and I realized that a couple of them were just down the road from me at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. I was a graduate student at Arizona State. This was Steve Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, who were neuroscientists by training. They were not magicians, but they’d started to take an interest in magic and had published one big review piece about magic.
And so I reached out to them and told them who I was and what I was up to, and we struck up a long-term collaboration. At that point, they were noodling the idea of writing a popular science book on the neuroscience of magic so I became their magic consultant. I was their magic teacher, I built an act for them to audition for the Magic Castle, and I had some pieces… I contributed some ideas for the book. And the interest that that book garnered from not just the public, but from the scientific community, showed me that there’s meat on the bone here. There’s real work that can be done. There can be an entire career built upon the seed of an idea of studying the methods of magicians. I guess that’s the long story of how I got to where I’m at now. As a psychologist now, about a third of what I do in the laboratory is still the sort of language research, and now two-thirds of my output is in the domain of the science of magic.
Zach: Yeah. It seems like, obviously, attention and misdirection are a big part of magic. Can you talk a little bit about what are some of the ways that magicians misdirect people’s attention or draw their attention to other things? And am I right in saying that that’s a big part of magic?
Anthony: Absolutely. I think that was the foot in the door for psychologists to begin looking at magic. What were some of the techniques that magicians were using to choreograph their audience’s attention so that they can be more readily deceived? There is scads of thinking on this in the magic community, but one of the points that falls out of all this discussion is that misdirection isn’t just distraction. If you know that your attention has been distracted and then you see something that you didn’t expect, well, there’s no magic there because you know you just weren’t attending at the right time or the right place. So, misdirection is really about direction. It’s about directing the audience’s attention to something that feels relevant and feels important. You have to give them something meaningful to attend to while you’re engaging in your shenanigans elsewhere as a magician. Magicians have this huge toolbox of cues that they can use to control an audience’s attention. Probably the greatest tool in their arsenal is social attention cues and social gaze cues. Magicians know that the audience is likely to be attending where they’re looking. So the magicians make sure that their gaze is directed toward exactly what they want their audience to be attending to. We as humans have this strong urge to gaze-follow, and it’s been suggested that this is really one of the things that evolution endowed us with. We got these big whites of our eyes. There are no other species of monkeys that have big whites of their eyes, and monkeys and chimpanzees do not gaze-follow the same way that even newborn babies tend to. It’s remarkable. That’s the strongest tool in the magician’s arsenal.
So if I’m doing a dumb little trick like making a coin vanish by only pretending to transfer it from one hand to the other, well, my gaze, my eyes should follow where the audience presumes that coin to be or where I want the audience to presume that coin to be. If I do that sleight of hand and then I direct my gaze toward the dirty hand, the trick falls apart immediately. And it’s not just gaze, right? There are other social cues that are readily used by magicians.
Zach: Yeah, real quick. I was wondering if have there been any studies, informal or otherwise, where they show a magic trick but take away the magician’s head and it doesn’t work as well-
Anthony: Yes. Yep, there’s been a lot of that. One of the oldest tricks in the book is called the vanishing ball illusion. In that trick, the magician throws a little ball in the air a couple of times and on the third throw, the ball vanishes in midair. Well, the magician has just retained the ball in his hand. He feigned throwing the ball in the air. But the audience has this strong experience that the ball has vanished in midair that they saw the ball leave the magician’s hand and it vanished in midair. Well, there’s been a lot of research trying to figure out what causes this illusion. And some of the earliest work used the technique that you’re articulating. They took away the social gaze cues from the performer to see if people were still susceptible to the illusion. And they still were susceptible to the illusion, just not quite as much.
Zach: Right, there’s multiple factors. Yeah.
Anthony: Yep. That’s one of the complexities of doing this research. Magic tricks and the experience of magic tricks never have just one cause. Magicians are piling deceptive techniques, one on top of the other, to increase their odds of deception. So there’s been a lot of work on that weird little trick.
Zach: Yeah, and you were going to go on. What are some other major ways of distraction— or misdirection, I should say? Obviously, verbal is one. I’m sure there’s many others, as you said.
Anthony: Those social cues include body tension. The hand that’s holding the coin should be more tense than the hand that’s presumably not holding a coin. Audiences are sensitive to subtle variability in tension and their attention is even captured by unexpected tension— tension that doesn’t make sense. And body posture, right? Our posture tells other people what we are attending to or what we find to be important in the environment around us. The thing you mentioned, of course, language. Language is a powerful tool of misdirection. The narrative structures of magic effectively tell the audience what’s relevant and what’s irrelevant. If I want to be sure that the audience’s attention is localized to a certain spot at a certain time, I tell them to look there. Right? If I spread out the deck, I say, “Look, your card isn’t in the deck!” Right? People follow those directions really well and that allows me to get away with all manner of shenanigans elsewhere.
But perhaps more interestingly for you, humor is a powerful tool of misdirection that a lot of magic theorists have talked about. Magicians have this intuition that the moment an audience understands the punchline of a joke, they’re briefly blinded to the world around them. This has not been tested in the laboratory. There are no published works looking at humor as a tool of misdirection or helping us understand why humor might be an effective tool of misdirection. There are a couple of dominant hypotheses out there waiting to be tested.
Zach: It’s like a brief overwhelm, that kind of thing?
Anthony: Yeah. One group of researchers thinks it’s all about the emotional content of humor, that there’s something about the mirthfulness of humor that leads to a general relaxation of attention. I think there’s something much more interesting going on. I think humor taxes your short-term memory or your working memory if you will. Working memory is where you’re holding content you’re currently processing or making sense of or trying to organize. And think about how a joke might impact your working memory. Jokes have a setup. They have a punchline. The setup creates an expectation, the punchline doesn’t match that expectation. So the only way to make sense of a punchline is to travel back in time and reinterpret that setup in light of this new constraint. That’s a working memory task. You have to manipulate the language that you’re holding in your working memory to try to resolve the ambiguity in this new way. And so my hypothesis is that this process of organizing and rearranging working memory requires attention, attention focused inward toward these memory processes. And attention is sort of a limited resource. So in order to focus more attention inward, that has to come from somewhere. So I think it’s usurping attentional resources from the world so that you can focus them inward. We’re working on a series of experiments testing that hypothesis right now.
Zach: It would help explain why humor is so often used by stage magicians. I would imagine there’s some element, too, of humor just making magicians more likable so you are less likely to want to prove them wrong.
Anthony: Absolutely. Yeah, I think the first minutes of a magician’s show are really important because the magician has to establish some kind of rapport with that audience, especially if they’re going to be engaging in a lot of these social misdirection tools. Who are you more likely to gaze follow, your friend or some stranger on the street? Your friend. So a magician wants to establish this rapport so that all of these tools will become more powerful so that they can more effectively control their audience’s attention.
Zach: Yeah, it seems like even for the more serious dark magicians, there’s still a subtle element of humor and they’re like, “I know I seem really mysterious and dark, but there’s still elements of rapport building.” Yeah, I thought about that a bit. Like the Criss Angels or David Blanks, there’s still this element of humor in the mix there or self-awareness of like, “This is a funny act I’m putting on,” kind of thing.
Anthony: That’s right. And the places where you don’t need that rapport would be big stage illusions that really aren’t contingent on manipulating the visual attention of the audience.
Zach: Right. That can be very different than close-up magic.
Anthony: Yeah, it’s like the mechanism or the box does the work there. You don’t need to distract. You don’t need any of that. And so if you are a performer who wants to play it serious and maybe not work so much on this rapport building, you’re going to succeed in grand illusions.
Zach: One thing I’ve wondered is… I think it might’ve been in your work I was reading recently, or maybe something else where you read about people looking the unexpected way or the unintended way during a magic act and seeing a little bit more than they should have and seeing how it was done. But I’m curious, it seems like that seldom happens for good magicians. And I’m wondering, does it happen more than I think and maybe we just don’t hear about it because most people aren’t seeing those things? Or are good magicians just so skilled that very few people look the wrong way?
Anthony: Yeah, I think it’s the latter. I think skilled magicians have thought enough about the narrative structure of their performance that the entire audience is locked into it. There’s a lot of psychological research on how audiences control their attention when watching films. If you monitor people’s eye movements while they watch a really great movie, everybody’s looking at exactly the same spots at exactly the same times because they’re using the narrative to predict where the action is going to occur, where they need to be looking to extract meaningful content in the moment. And so a good magician is doing the same thing as a film director, trying to choreograph the actions so that audiences are making predictions about what’s relevant and irrelevant and guiding their attention accordingly. Yeah.
So if audience members are engaged with the narrative, then they should all be looking at roughly the same spots. Even, in fact, blinking at the same time.
Zach: Right. I want to talk more about that because I know you’ve done some work on that. I was going to keep going unless you wanted to add more there.
Anthony: Sure. In those instances where a person has seen something or has looked at the wrong spot at the right time or whatever, that’s probably an instance where their attention has lapsed, where they have failed to track the narrative for a moment. They got distracted by their own thoughts or something like that and so then they weren’t influenced by the techniques of the magicians to be misdirected.
Zach: Yeah, I can see your point. It’s like a good director and a good magician and probably other performers have to have a really good sense of how their things appear to the audience. That’s what makes them good, is understanding and predicting how people will react to it.
Anthony: Yeah, that’s right.
Zach: I saw you’d researched how magicians might use other modes like, say, verbal language to aid in misdirection, like, say, physical misdirection. At least that’s what I was understanding. Could you explain a little bit more about how that works?
Anthony: Yeah. When discussing misdirection, magicians will often use the term offbeat. For example, if you tell a joke and you want to get away with some piece of sleight of hand, you’ll align that sleight of hand with the punchline of the joke. They’ll call that moment the offbeat. It’s a moment when the audience’s attention seems to be reduced or focused inward or whatever. While I was still a graduate student, I started taking a deeper look at what magicians really mean by offbeats. They describe lots of different ways to create offbeats, and I wondered if these different techniques are all calling upon the same psychological mechanisms or if they’re different techniques that we’re using the same name for. So, yeah, a joke was one of the things that magicians will do. A climax in the magic can serve as an offbeat. If you reveal that something has vanished from somewhere, in that moment, the audience is relatively blinded to things around them and you can use that moment, the revelation, to get away with sleight of hand that sets you up for the next phase of the trick. Those seem to be related, right? Those seem to be about this working memory stuff. When you see that something has vanished, what do you do? Well, you probably try to work backwards to figure out where it went. You probably try to access things that are in your working memory to reconstruct what the magician could have done to get to this place.
But there was one other technique that magicians called an offbeat that seemed different to me. They will create a rhythm, either through music or through speech, and they will align their deceptive action on the literal offbeat of the rhythm. So if you think about downbeats and upbeats in music, they would align their sleight of hand with the upbeat. There are a handful of magic tricks that seem to exploit this phenomenon and I, for my doctoral dissertation, decided to explore the mechanisms behind that flavor of offbeat. Psychology at that time was familiar with what’s known as attentional entrainment, that when there’s a rhythmic event in the environment, our attention aligns itself with that rhythm so that you have heightened sensitivity at moments when important things are happening and you can kind of rest in between. It was a known phenomenon.
But what magicians seemed to be doing that was unknown to psychology was they were using auditory stimuli to influence visual awareness. This was happening across sensory systems. They were using music to impact visual awareness. And that really had not been studied when I started doing my dissertation work.
So in my dissertation work, I decided to distill this down to the simplest case of trying to detect a subtle visual event like the appearance of a dot on a computer screen while people listen to a very simple rhythmic tone which is played at a consistent clip. And some participants had to monitor the tones for an oddball, like a tone that didn’t match all the others, just so we knew that they were paying attention to them. And we manipulated the onset of this dot relative to the rhythm that they were being exposed to. Sometimes the dot could appear on the beat, sometimes it could appear shifted off of the beat. And we found that people’s accuracy and reaction time to report this dot were impacted by its alignment with the rhythm. If the dot happened off the beat, they were slower and less accurate to detect it than if it appeared on the beat. This was the first time to demonstrate that the mere presence of an auditory rhythm could impact visual awareness. And we showed that the effect happened even if people didn’t have to focus on the tones at all. If they were just present, the mere presence of this rhythm impacted participants’ visual awareness. This is really an example of how you can take an idea from magic and pull all the magic out of it to test its validity in psychology.
Zach: So in concrete examples, magicians might be doing something rhythmically language-wise or maybe rhythmically physically, and that kind of entrains the audience’s attention. And then when they do things in between those times, they’re more likely to have people miss it. Right?
Anthony: There was an anecdotal account that I heard while I was working on this. I could never track it down to any particular individual, but there was this story that I heard repeatedly of a stage illusionist who was complaining that his audience kept catching him activating this mechanism with his foot while he was performing. They would see it. They kept catching him. And somebody asked him, “There’s music playing while you’re doing this?” He’s like, “Yeah.”
“Are you moving with the music?” And he said, “Yeah.”
“Are you hitting the button on the beat?” He said, “Yeah!”
So they encouraged him to press the button, hit the trap off the beat, and people no longer caught him doing the dirty work.
Zach: Well, that’s a perfect example. But you said it was anecdotal, you couldn’t track down the details.
Anthony: I could not find a source for that.
Zach: It’s a good representation of the concept.
Anthony: Yeah. There are some visual magic tricks that do really seem to exploit this phenomenon that wouldn’t play very well in a podcast, I think. [laughs]
Zach: I can imagine. This is related to when you mentioned magicians blinking and getting people to basically entrain the blinking so they’ll blink at the best moments to miss things. That’s related to that.
Anthony: Yeah. This is one of those places where people who claim expertise in lie detection or body language get it wrong. Lots of people claim that heightened blink rates are a cue to lying. But that’s not the way it works. In fact, you tend to blink less in moments when you’re engaging in deceptive action because deception is cognitively complex. You have to maintain the truth and the lie and make sure the lie is consistent in order to be a good deceiver. And so all the attention that goes to maintaining that reduces your blink rate. After a lie is over or after a deception, you see this rebound in blink rates where there’s a bunch of blinking after it’s over. It turns out audiences that are watching a magic show use the blinking of the performer to gauge when there is nothing important happening. So, their blinks tend to synchronize with the blinks of a performer. Richard Weissman over in the UK did an experiment using a magic trick performed by Teller of Penn & Teller and looked at the blink behavior of participants watching this video, and the participants in the video tended to be blinking their eyes in the moments when Teller was engaged in deceptive action because the narrative and perhaps his own blink rates were telling the audience, “This is a moment to relax, there’s nothing important happening right here. “And if you look at blinking behavior of people who are watching a speaker who’s telling a story, their blinks synchronize with that speaker. There’s quite a bit of work on this now. They’re using the the speaker’s blinking as a proxy metric of when they can relax or when there’s not meaningful information to be captured.
Zach: It relates to what we started talking about about how the human beings eyes are so communicative and seem like they’re set up that way. Right? We have a lot of white space and it’s almost like we can communicate anxiety. You can imagine back in the day when early humans were scared. Seeing someone’s eyes widened about something communicates a lot. So I can see that as related where it’s like when someone’s eyes are not blinking, it makes us a little bit more anxious and more aware. It kind of relates to cats. They say cats, too. Cats communicate relaxation and friendliness by doing long slow blinks at each other, which is kind of related, which is something I use. When I want to befriend a cat, me and other people do long slow blinks to basically set the cats at ease, which I think works for mammals in general maybe. Because we can accidentally communicate our anxiety to people by having wider unblinking eyes. But yeah, it just makes me think of all that and how the blinking makes us think, “Oh, there’s nothing much going on here or something.” They’re relaxed blinking.
Anthony: I don’t know if it’s true but I feel like I’ve heard that Anthony Hopkins made sure that he he never blinked while he was on screen playing Hannibal Lecter because was so off-putting.
Zach: It was. Yeah. But now that you mentioned that, yeah, when I think of him, I just think of him staring with wide open eyes and unblinking strangely. Yeah, that’s a good example. I don’t know if you had any more to say about that but I was going to ask you about the work you’ve done about how magicians might self-deceive themselves when it comes to blinking and missing things.
Anthony: Uh-huh. You’d like me to talk about that now?
Zach: Sure. Yeah.
Anthony: Sure. A few years ago, we set out on this really strange project: Looking at blinking behaviors in performing magicians. The reason that we explored this is that it seemed like it could be a very clear-cut instance of self-deception. There were anecdotal accounts of magicians, who when rehearsing their sleight of hand in front of a mirror, would blink their eyes the moment they carried out a piece of sleight of hand, thereby editing any evidence of that deception out of their consciousness. They were removing any evidence that they were no good at the sleight of hand. It seemed like it could be a very clear-cut instance of self-deception. And looking at the literature on self-deception, we became keenly aware that the evidence for self-deception sucks. That there are very few clear examples of a person both knowing the truth and pushing that truth outside of their conscious awareness. By definition, self-deception requires knowledge of the truth that lives in the unconscious mind and that isn’t available to consciousness. And so we thought about this anecdote and we thought, “Can we produce this phenomenon in the lab? Can we produce self-deceptive blinking? And can we push it around with some other manipulations?”
So we recruited a handful of magicians with varying levels of experience and expertise and we gave them one week to learn this complicated series of sleight of hand moves with coins. We gave them one week to learn this thing. Some of the pieces of sleight of hand were common pieces of sleight of hand that probably all the magicians had had experience with, some of them were weird things that we kind of created for the experiment that they would have no familiarity with. And then we brought them into the lab and we had them perform this routine four times. Twice in front of a mirror so it emulated a rehearsal setting– they had full visual feedback– and twice just in front of a camera, so emulating more of a performance environment with none of that visual feedback. Then we moved to the the really labor-intensive process of coding frame by frame in all of these videos, whether the magician’s eyes were open or closed, and whether that frame happened in the bounds of a piece of sleight of hand or outside of those boundaries. We expected that these magicians would be more apt to blink while they were carrying out sleight of hand than when not and we expected that that blinking behavior would increase when they were in a rehearsal setting when they had this visual feedback. That should be the situation that produces this behavior, compared to the performance setting where they have none of that visual feedback.
Well, we found that indeed these magician participants were more apt to blink while they were engaged in deceptive action than when not. But that tendency was heightened in the performance setting compared to rehearsal setting. So, to the extent that magicians are blinking when they’re carrying out deceptive action, it’s not in service of self-deception because they’re doing it in moments when they aren’t capturing visual information from the world around them. It was exactly opposite to our predictions. This made us think about this work from Richard Weissman that showed that audience members blinking tends to align with moments of deceptive action and teller’s act. And there’s research literature showing that audience members entrain their blinking to that of a speaker. And we hypothesize— this is after-the-fact hypothesizing, we cannot verify this— but we think that perhaps these non-conscious blinking behaviors by the magicians are really meant to communicate relaxation to the audience to encourage the audience members to blink at these moments when the magicians are engaging in deceptive action.
Zach: That would presumably be not even something consciously the performers are doing, it’s just something instinctual they’re doing.
Anthony: Yeah. Yes, humans are unaware of when they’re blinking and they’re mostly unaware of what their eyes are pointed at at any moment in time. Yeah, so this would all be non-conscious. And none of the magicians who participated had awareness that it was an experiment about blinking. [laughs]
Zach: Right, they weren’t even thinking about that or wouldn’t describe it in that way. That’s interesting. Yeah.
Anthony: Yeah, we also did find that this blinking behavior increases when the participants are engaged in complicated unfamiliar sleight of hand compared to the really familiar easy stuff. That was a prediction that came from the self-deception hypothesis. So that was borne out but still, that tendency was heightened in performance compared to rehearsal. It’s very strange.
Zach: Huh, interesting. To switch topics, when it comes to magicians reading the behavior of audience members in service of their tricks, for example in mentalist-type acts, I’m not sure how often that actually happens versus having the appearance of reading audience members’ behavior, but just certain things come to mind in that realm.
Anthony: Yeah, that has become a really popular cover story for mentalists. That they’re using body language and social cues to read minds effectively. Any time a magician claims they’re reading a spectator’s body language, they definitely aren’t. [chuckles] While there are certainly some consistent relationships between behavior and mental processes, there are lots of individual differences that make these cues almost useless. So, magicians cannot rely very heavily on any of these pieces of body language. It’s just become a sexy cover story for traditional mentalism and traditional magic.
Zach: Yeah. I was just reading that New York article about Derren Brown from a few years ago where he talked about how in the modern world where everybody is obviously more skeptical about real magic, it becomes a more sexier interesting thing to talk about how we might be manipulating people’s minds and easier to understand or theoretically more plausible ways that make you think, “Hey, maybe this could be possible,” as opposed to just rejecting magic entirely.
Anthony: Yeah. Yep, it has a little bit of plausibility that makes it just really sticky as an idea. Derren Brown was really the dude who popularized this style of magic, and also, a friend of mine from Phoenix named Kent Knepper was among the first to use these deeply psychological cover stories for rather traditional magic. And so I have a love-hate relationship with this style of magic, right? [laughs] It can be beautiful, it can be compelling, audiences love it, but it is antithetical to the ethical code that I have to live up to. Using those cover stories- those believable cover stories- for traditional magic spreads misinformation about what is and isn’t possible with psychology. And so a lot of these mentalists and magicians take issue with people who claim to have legitimate psychic abilities. Even Derren Brown has spent a lot of time debunking pseudo-psychics, showing that they’re charlatans who are using magic tricks to fleece the masses
Zach: But he’s doing a similar thing.
Anthony: He’s doing a similar thing with these psychological cover stories, maybe even the same thing. He’s encouraging false beliefs about the world around us through these kinds of performances. What’s perhaps even worse is that even if you include a disclaimer, the disclaimer has no impact on the takeaway that people get from the show. There has now been science on this. My colleague, Gustav Kuhn from Plymouth University in the UK, has done a series of experiments where he’s presented people with a mentalism act that looked like psychic behavior or psychic phenomenon, and he included a series of different disclaimers. Like, a disclaimer that says, “This is a magician who is simulating psychic ability,” or introducing them as a legitimate psychic. Afterwards, if he surveys people’s beliefs about what they’ve seen, people believe that they’ve witnessed psychic ability, regardless of whether there was a disclaimer or not. So Derren Brown, for years, has opened his TV shows with this disclaimer that’s a little bit ambiguous. It’s like, “I’m using magic and body language and linguistics and all this stuff. I’m not a psychic.” But to the extent that that disclaimer is meant to control the beliefs and the takeaway message of the audience, it’s not doing it. So, I’ve got deep ethical concerns about misrepresenting magic as something more.
Zach: Yeah, I can see it from different angles where it’s like, “Hey, what Derren Brown does is pretty cool,” but I can see your point too. Because I’ve done episodes and written about these behavior bullshit people who… I did a past episode on this specific guy, Jack Brown, but there’s plenty of these people who do basically the same thing. But they’re actually deceiving themselves in a lot of cases. Jack Brown really thinks he can read people exactly and tell you, like, “I saw this slight gesture in the Bill Gates interview and I think it means all these over-the-top things,” which to me— And I’ve written about how harmful this is, this kind of stuff. People believe these things and they go out and it basically just allows them to use their biases and service of whatever they want to use them for—
Anthony: That’s right.
Zach: “I think I can read this person because I saw them do this slight thing, and so I believe that they have the motivations I think they have because I…” You know, it’s just all this confirmation bias. Giving people these dangerous stupid ideas, basically. So I can definitely see your concern.
Anthony: My colleague, Ray Hyman, who really did some of the earliest science of magic work back in the ’80s, when he was an undergraduate, took up palm reading because he could meet girls with it. It seemed like a really effective way to meet girls. He went into it just thinking it’s just fun, and then he started convincing himself that there’s something to it. The feedback he would get from these people whose palms he would read at parties blew him away. And he told one of his psychology professors about it while he was an undergraduate and they said, “Hey, try this. Next time you’re reading a palm, tell them the opposite of what you think the palm is saying.” And he did it, and it worked just as well. We’re so susceptible to that kind of confirmation bias, finding evidence that supports our beliefs and ignoring evidence that disconfirms our beliefs.
Zach: Yeah, speaking of the self-deception aspects, I’m actually going to be interviewing an astrology author— which I didn’t expect to do, because I was like, “Well, I don’t believe in it. So if you’re willing to have a really tough conversation…” So that’ll be an interesting one because I get to ask some questions about, like, “Why do you believe these things?” But anyway…
Anthony: Well, I can’t wait to hear it.
Zach: That’ll be an interesting one. I didn’t think he’d say yes. But yeah, I do think it’s interesting how we can fool ourselves with these things. Because I used to actually work for a neurolinguistic programming seminar guy, somebody who was in the Anthony Robbins circle, and I only took the job because I was like, “This will be very interesting.” It was back in the financial crisis of 2008 so I was like, “Okay, I’ll do this for a little while.” But it was very interesting because part of his backstory was basically like, “People kept telling me how good I was at these amazing psychological and mental feats. I was skeptical at first, but eventually, I believed.” He told me once, “I just put you into a trance there, didn’t I?” And I was like, “No, I don’t think so.”
Anthony: [laughs] Ouch.
Zach: But he really did believe that he had these powers to put people in trances. He would say things like, “I can raise the temperature of the room just by saying certain words.” He thought he had this control over people. But it’s just interesting how people… I don’t think it happens in the magic space because people are obviously more aware.
Anthony: It absolutely does.
Zach: Oh, really?
Anthony: Subsets of the magic community really glommed on to NLP when it became big. They read Bandler and Grinder and they have tried to apply these things to their performances. In fact, a name I’ve dropped already, Kent Knepper out of Phoenix, was one of the first to do this. And I don’t believe that Kenton believes that NLP is doing it, but he’s not totally open with other magicians about this skepticism. I don’t actually know what Kenton believes.
Zach: People keep things close to the vest for various reasons.
Anthony: He put out a series of originally, I believe, audio tapes called Wonder Words that were magic inspired by NLP and that attempted to harness the power of NLP. It’s out there, and lots of magicians to this day claim that they are using NLP to enhance their deceptions.
Zach: And I will say I think there are a few good ideas in NLP because NLP is just a bundle of a bunch of random… Some of the ideas are better than others, some of the ideas have validity. And if it wasn’t a little bit of validity, nobody would listen to it. It’s just like a bundle of tricks, some of them are completely nonsense, and some of them are like, “Okay, well, that makes some sense.”
Anthony: A magician’s need to heighten his or her deceptions really opens the door to superstition. Right? Magicians have these things they call subtleties, just little things that they pile on top of each other to enhance a deception. Like with the coin thing, right? The tension thing was a subtlety, and gaze would be a subtlety, and all these things would be subtleties. But magicians don’t have the capacity to test whether one of those subtleties has an impact. They’re not doing a reductive experiment to independently examine the impact of each one of these subtleties. That’s a recipe for us engaging in behaviors that we think have some impact when they really don’t. It’s a recipe for superstitious behavior, and I think there’s probably a lot of that within the magic community, and a lot of that with this NLP stuff.
Zach: And I imagine in general, for any competitive-performance-based thing, there’s benefits to making yourself think you have more power than you do. There’s definitely incentives to overstate your own mystique or power in your own mind just so that you feel more confident and such. So I can see how there’s a dangerous edge there where if you get too far into the self-deception, it becomes a liability. But maybe a little dose of that can be good for you.
Anthony: Magicians talk about magician’s guilt; the knowledge that you’re engaging in deceptive action can lead to some tells and some weird behaviors– the guilty behaviors. So, confidence is a way to get beyond those. Right? If you’re just confident that it’s all going to work, you’re not going to use any of those tells.
Zach: Interesting. Yeah, I haven’t heard about that. That’s an interesting one. Yeah, guilt and worry are not good things for performing.
Anthony: That’s right.
Zach: Yeah. When you watch magic shows, do you generally have a sense of what’s going on? Are there any shows you’ve seen recently where you’re like, “I have no idea how they did that?” And if so, what were those shows?
Anthony: I mean, there are only a handful of methods in magic that just get reapplied in unique ways to create new effects. Once you’ve got training in these things, you can see through a lot of stuff. But I’ve really changed my perspective on magic in the last decade, and I’m really highly motivated to see magic and perform magic that’s narrative-driven, that’s telling a story, that’s about building a relationship with the audience. I’m less concerned with the actual tricks that are happening, and more in how they’re happening, how they’re being presented. And so because I apply that lens to magic now, I get fooled all the time. Because I am really keyed into the narrative and really keyed into the storyline, and so I’m pretty easily misdirected because of it.
Zach: Makes it more fun.
Anthony: It makes it more fun. A few years ago, there was an Off-Broadway show called In & Of Itself by Derek DelGaudio, and they filmed a documentary version of this that’s available on Hulu called In & Of Itself, and I really believe that it changed the game on what magic can be. It’s not presented as a magic show. I don’t think it’s ever pitched as a magic show, but it is. It’s a series of six or something magic effects. It was directed by Frank Oz, a one-man show with this Derek DelGaudio, and I think it changed the game for magic because it was one of the first magic shows that elicited a full range of emotions. It wasn’t just a comedy show. I cried at times watching it, I laughed, I experienced awe, and it built a relationship between this one performer and a large audience. I believe that the audience members left that show with a weird sense of community for having experienced this thing together. There are some things in that show that fool my pants off, but it’s really beautiful and people should seek it out. And I think it sort of renewed magicians’ interest in having a throughline of action in their shows, actually building a character, actually having a theme for a show, having deeper ideas for their magic… I think it’s changed things. That’s the kind of magic that I’m now really, really interested in.
Zach: No, that sounds cool. I’m definitely going to check that out.
Anthony: But I will say I also have ethical concerns with that show. There is one piece in the show where he gets a spectator from the audience— I don’t want to spoil this because it’s really beautiful and really ethically dubious.
Zach: Spoiler alert for anybody watching, maybe.
Anthony: I think I won’t give spoilers.
Zach: Okay.
Anthony: Obviously, the person that’s coming up from the audience doesn’t know what they’re consenting to. They don’t know what’s going to happen when they get up on stage. And while they’re up there, he creates this deeply unique emotional experience for this person on stage that they did not expect to have and that’s really just for them that the audience doesn’t really get to witness, but they see this person break down because of this emotional response to this magic that they’ve experienced. And I think, as a researcher, I have to get informed consent from people. They have to know what they’re consenting to before they participate in one of my experiments. They have to know what they’re going to be asked to do, what’s expected of them, what they can expect to feel during this event. And I understand theater doesn’t require the same kind of consent process, but I think it makes me feel icky to have this person put in this really precarious emotional position in front of an audience of 500 people without consent, without them knowing that this is going to happen.
Zach: Yeah, it’s like when comedians insult you. A comedian made me feel awkward and bad the other night and I was like, “Hey, why do they always do that?” It kind of reminded me of that. Well, this has been great. I did want to ask you real quick. I know we’re coming up on time, but did you want to talk for a couple of minutes about why you’re interested in analyzing handwritten language?
Anthony: Oh! Yeah, that was what I went to grad school to do in the first place. That was part of the language work that I did in grad school and it was inspired by this big asymmetry in the research literature. Everything we know about reading is based on research using typewritten words. Like the simplest case of reading, nobody had done anything exploring how the processes of reading might change when the input is messy and ambiguous and incomplete and in a style of handwriting you’ve not ever seen before. How are people able to look at handwritten words from someone whose handwriting they’ve never seen before and find the signal within the noise to know what those words are? That’s what inspired this. And in the spoken language research area, those researchers would never consider using an artificial voice for their stimuli. Their stimuli are always naturally produced human speech. So why in the reading domain, are we not also looking at naturally produced human stimuli? That’s where that came from. Of course, when people hear that I do handwriting research, they assume I’m studying graphology– reading people’s personalities through the style of their handwriting, which, of course, is nonsense. But because people assume this about me so much…
Zach: Because it’s connected to the magic kind of.
Anthony: It kind of is. Yeah.
Zach: That’s how people see it, or something. Yeah.
Anthony: A student and I have just completed a new meta-analysis of graphology because there hasn’t been one since 1992 and yet people are still making hiring decisions using input from… [crosstalk] Not in the United States very much. Still in Europe, a lot in Asia. And so just for funsies, our student and I did a meta-analysis that we’re going to try to get published pretty soon.
Zach: Oh, that’s interesting.
Anthony: Spoiler alert, there’s still no solid evidence the graphology works. [laughs]
Zach: I’m shocked. Yeah, I can see why you’re interested in the handwritten words. It’s like there’s some archetypes of symbols that we have that allow us to easily recognize things. Is that what makes it interesting to you? Because we have these internal rough, amorphous ideas of—
Anthony: Yeah. Yes, they’re fuzzy. These templates are very fuzzy to allow for a lot of variability.
Zach: Same with spoken language, we have chunks of amorphous templates or something. Yeah.
Anthony: I’ve got a hypothesis that I want to come up with a good way to test in regards to handwriting that I think is very cute. [chuckles] If you’re looking at pictures of celebrities and identifying the celebrities, you’re faster to identify a celebrity when given a caricature of that celebrity than when given a real picture of that celebrity. Why? Because the distinctive features of that celebrity are exaggerated in a caricature, so it’s easy to recognize them. And so I’ve often wondered, there are some flourishes in our handwriting. Right? The tails on Ys, they get this big flourish. There’s some pieces of handwriting that get exaggerated. And I wonder if that exaggeration is actually for the reader if we are magnifying those distinctive features of the words to make it easier on the reader. I haven’t tested it, I’d love to, but it feels oddly related to all this other stuff that I’m up to.
Zach: Has anyone studied why doctors’ handwriting is so bad? [Tony laughs] If it is so bad, I know I hear that a lot but…
Anthony: Not that I know of, but I suspect it’s a speed-accuracy trade-off. Right? [laughs]
Zach: I don’t know if it’s true, but you often hear that cliché.
Anthony: Yeah, that’s right.
Zach: All right. Well, this has been great, Tony. I appreciate it. It was very interesting, and thanks for taking the time.
Anthony: Thanks, this was a lot of fun.