Lay Audiences and Magician Audiences

So when you go to watch a magician perform, how do you watch him? As a magician - or as a layperson? This could be an important question, as both bring different mindsets to how a performance is decoded. More than one magic theorist has pointed to the difference - Wonder, Ortiz and Weber to name just a few.

In "Scientific American Mind" magazine Volume 18, #1, there is an article called "Jumping to Conclusions" by Deanna Kuhn. It's an article detailing her work in the area of human fallability when it comes to reasoning. Essentially she shows that when evaluating a situation, people cannot help but jump to conclusions based on their own knowledge. Therefore the specifics of the situation are disregarded in favour of what the person might know about those kinds of situations in general, leading to an erroneous conclusion. My own current thesis deals with how old age stereotypes may bias juror's thinking in evaluating the testimony of elders.

In any case, if we apply this to magic we find that... well, that magic theorists are already aware of it. It is one reason (but not the only reason) why an audience of magicians perceive a likely magic trick differently to lay audiences. This was most elegantly discussed in "Designing Miracles" by Darwin Ortiz, a book I highly recommend to all magicians.

Ortiz suggests that magician's will try to understand a magic trick using their technical knowledge where-as lay audiences just try to use commonsense. For magicians, their expertise prevents them from seeing the commonsense explanations that a layperson would leap to. He gives the example of Fred Kaps foiling an audience of magicians with a coin through handkerchief. The magicians couldn't figure it out despite all the technical knowledge they threw at it. The truth of the matter is that, as a joke, Kaps had simply cut a hole in the handkerchief and passed the coin through it, an explanation which would have immediately occurred to a layperson. Magicians on the other hand, wouldn't even consider an explanation so simple.

On "Penn & Teller's Magic and Mystery Tour" DVDs, there's a good example of using a magician's technical knowledge against him. In the Egypt episode, a local magician named Karam demonstrates the cups and balls for Teller. Teller watches Karam perform all the moves suggesting that the balls are no longer distributed one under each cup, but are actually under the centre cup. In fact, they were still one under each cup - Karam had used Teller's knowledge and expectations against him.

Anyway the point of this is not about showing how you can fool magicians. Rather, it is about the neccessity of assessing how a trick is perceived from a lay point of view. You may be a highly knowledgeable magician, but you must still try to cultivate a layperson's viewpoint in order to assess how a trick, whether yours or someone else's, appears to a layperson. Remember, the illusion occurs in the layperson's head, not yours.

Be seeing you, Escherwolf