Washington: A new research has revealed how magicians sway decision-making.
A team of researchers from McGill University has combined the art of conjuring and the science of psychology to demonstrate how certain contextual factors can sway the decisions people make, even though they may feel that they are choosing freely, a finding with potential implications even for daily decision-making.
Lead author Jay Olson said that they began with a principle of magic that they didn't fully understand: how magicians influence audiences to choose a particular card without their awareness and found that people tend to choose options that are more salient or attention-grabbing, but they don't know why they chose them.
The research was conducted in two stages. In the first, Olson approached 118 people on streets and university campuses and asked them to choose a card by glancing at one as he flipped through a deck of playing cards. The entire riffle took around half a second, but Olson used a technique to make one of the cards, the "target card," more prominent than the rest. Some 98 percent of participants chose the target card; but nine in 10 reported feeling they had a free choice. Many concocted explanations for their decisions.
In the second stage, the researchers created a simple computer-based version of the riffle by presenting a series of 26 images of cards sequentially on a screen. Researchers asked participants to silently choose a card, then enter it after each of 28 different trials.
Overall, participants chose the target card on 30 percent of the trials. Although "reasonably high" this rate was much lower than in the first study, "possibly because many of the social and situational factors central to magic tricks were absent" from the conventional laboratory conditions in which this stage was carried out, says co-author Ronald Rensink.
Magic provides an unusual lens to examine and unravel behaviour and the processing of higher brain functions, says co-author Amir Raz, adding this study joins a nascent wave of experiments that binds the magical arts to the principles of psychological and neural sciences.
Raz added that such a marriage has the potential to elucidate fundamental aspects of behavioural science as well as advance the art of conjuring.
The study is published in Consciousness and Cognition.
