Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic (The MIT Press)

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Ortega, J., Montañes, P., Barnhart, A. & Kuhn, G. (2018). Exploiting failures in metacognition through magic: Visual awareness as a source of visual metacognition bias. Consciousness and Cognition, 65, 152–168. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2018.08.008 Our findings have important implications for the way we process and think about information in our daily lives. We are continually exposed to false information, and it is often difficult to distinguish between real and fake news. Our results carry the rather worrying implication that even false ideas that we know to be impossible could affect our reasoning capacity and prevent us from discovering the truth. Definition 1. A generic cost-based GR problem is a tuple P = ⟨ D , Ω , o ⃗ , G , s , P r o b ⟩ where: Thomas, C., Didierjean, A. & Nicolas, S. (2016). Scientific study of magic: Binet’s pioneering approach based on observations and chronophotography. American Journal of Psychology, 129(3), 313–326.

To decide which of multiple potential observations is most likely to be attended, encoded, and available for future recall, we must put together both the top-down and bottom-up aspects of selective attention exposed in Lessons 3 and 2. That is, we propose to rely on both magnitude and relevance. Recall that goal recognition (GR) is the problem of determining an agent’s most probable goal from observations of its behaviour. We assume a single observer (the GR system) seeking to identify a single goal, though the observed behaviours may be performed by multiple actors. We further assume that the domain supports the notion of state-to-state transitions that can be costed and that the observable phenomena within the domain, whatever they consist of (e.g., actions, states, fluents, trajectories, etc.), are or can be associated with the transitions that give rise to them. 1 The past few years have seen a resurgence of interest in the scientific study of magic. Despite being only a few years old, this “new wave” has already resulted in a host of interesting studies, often using methods that are both powerful and original. These developments have largely borne out our earlier hopes ( Kuhn et al., 2008) that new opportunities were available for scientific studies based on the use of magic. And it would seem that much more can still be done along these lines.Experiencing the Impossible is a cogently argued, persuasive and often enthralling account of the pleasures he experienced while researching what he calls “one of the most captivating and enduring forms of entertainment."

To formalise this, we build on the notion of a rationality measure (RM) from ( Masters and Sardina, 2019b). The documented purpose of the RM is to evaluate an agent’s future expected degree of rationality, given their past behaviour. Here, we use it to evaluate and compare the apparent rationality of the observation sequences that would result from adding each of multiple potential observations (each o ∈ O t) to the recalled observation sequence ( o ⃗ t − 1) assembled so far. That is, given what we know, which potential observation provides the most rational continuation towards any one of the known possible goals. In our recently published study, a magician, Yuxuan Lan, asked a volunteer to hold a coin in one hand without letting Yuxuan know which hand it was in. He then proceeded to read the volunteer’s body language and claimed to be using psychological profiling to deduce the hand that held the coin. None of these psychological principles are possible, and instead Yuxuan used a secret conjuring method which guaranteed he knew which hand was holding the coin. Before and after this demonstration, we measured people’s beliefs in what Yuxuan claimed, and our results were rather surprising. Witnessing this magic performance significantly enhanced people’s beliefs in these pseudo-scientific principles, and this change in belief was independent of whether the participants were told the performer was a magician or a psychologist. Again, these results demonstrate how people ignore warnings about the inauthentic evidence they encounter. Whilst most magicians do not intentionally aim to misinform the public, these types of magic performances can have a significant impact on perpetuating false beliefs about psychology.

References

Confirmation bias inclines human observers to seek out confirmatory evidence for their previously-held beliefs. “Convincers” are one method in a magician’s arsenal for providing such evidence. Essentially, when our expectations are confirmed, confidence increases, our next prediction is made with even more certainty; and the effect can snowball.