The deceptive effects of suggestion are not confined to world leaders who remember fiction as fact. The same techniques are frequently used by professional deceivers to persuade people that they have experienced the impossible.
REMEMBERING THE IMPOSSIBLE
Magicians are honest deceivers. Unlike most liars, they are completely open about their intentions to cheat. Despite this, they still have to convince an audience that objects can disappear into thin air, that women can be sawn in half, and that the future can be predicted with uncanny accuracy.
For more than a hundred years, a handful of psychologists have investigated the secret psychology used by magicians to fool their audiences. In the 1890s, the American psychologist Joseph Jastrow teamed up with two world-famous illusionists to discover whether the hand really is quicker than the eye. Jastrow is one of my academic heroes. In one of the first experiments into subliminal perception, this amazing character analyzed the dreams of blind people and figured out the psychology behind the Ouija board. Unfortunately, Jastrow also suffered from mental illness: One Chicago newspaper reported the onset of his illness with the headline “Famous Mind Doctor Loses His Own.”
To investigate the psychology of magic, Jastrow collaborated with two illusionists named Alexander Herrmann and Harry Kellar.
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Herrmann and Kellar were among the most famous magicians of their day and were locked in a constant rivalry throughout most of their professional lives. If one made a donkey disappear, the other would make an elephant vanish. If one made a woman levitate above the stage, the other would have his assistant float a few feet higher. If one plucked a fan of cards from thin air, the other would perform the same feat blindfolded. Jastrow invited these two great performers to his University of Wisconsin laboratory and had them participate in a range of tests measuring their reaction time, speed of movement, and accuracy of finger motion. Jastrow’s results revealed little out of the ordinary, roughly matching those of a control group of nonmagicians collected a few years before.
But Jastrow scientifically demonstrated what most magicians already knew. Magic has little to do with fast movements. Instead, conjurors use a range of psychological weapons to fool their audiences. Suggestion plays a key role in the process. In the same way that people can be made to believe that they once went on a nonexistent trip in a hot-air balloon, or became lost in a shopping mall, so magicians have to be able to manipulate people’s perception of a performance.
The concept can be illustrated with a simple laboratory-based experiment that I recently conducted into mind over matter.
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I showed a group of my students a videotape in which a magician apparently used the power of his mind (actually sleight of hand) to bend a metal key. He then placed the key on the table, stood back, and said, “Look, it’s amazing, the key is still bending.” Afterward, all the students were interviewed about what they had seen. More than half were convinced that they had seen the key continuing to bend as it lay on the table, and they had no idea how the magician could have achieved such an impressive trick: a dramatic illustration of how an expert deceiver can draw upon years of experience to deliver a sentence with such confidence that people believe they see the impossible happening before their very eyes.
PSYCHOLOGY IN THE SÉANCE ROOM
Perhaps my most memorable set of studies examined the role of suggestion in the séance room.
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Much of this work was carried out with a friend of mine, Andy Nyman. Andy is a skilled actor and magician who helps create material for Derren Brown, the highly successful British television illusionist. I first met Andy many years ago at a conference on magic, and we discovered that we were both interested in the techniques used by fraudulent mediums in the nineteenth century to fake ghostly phenomena in the séance room. We were curious about whether the hundred-year-old techniques would fool a modern-day audience, and so we decided to stage a series of unusual experiments.
The plan was simple. We would invite groups of people to attend a theatrical reconstruction of a Victorian séance, and use various techniques, including suggestion, to fake spirit activity. We would then ask them to tell us what they had experienced so that we could assess whether they had been fooled by our attempts at deception. But first we needed a spooky-looking venue. We came across the House of Detention—a dark, dank, disused, underground Victorian prison in the heart of London. It was perfect. The owners kindly allowed us to rent this uninviting venue for a week, and we staged two fake shows per evening, with twenty-five people attending each séance.
When people arrived they were asked to complete a short questionnaire asking them whether they believed in the existence of genuine paranormal phenomena. I then led the group through the maze of underground prison corridors, briefly relating the history of the Victorian séance. Eventually they were taken along a narrow ventilation shaft into a large room at the heart of the prison. Here Andy introduced himself to the group and explained that he would be playing the part of the medium for the evening. With the room lit by a single candle, he asked everyone to join him around a large table in the center of the room.
For the next twenty minutes, Andy told the group a fictitious ghost story about the murder of a nonexistent Victorian music-hall singer named Marie Ambrose. According to Andy’s carefully crafted script, Marie had lived close to the prison, and her ghost had often been seen in the building. Andy then passed around various objects that were allegedly associated with her life, including a maraca, a hand bell, and a wicker ball. In reality, I had bought the objects from a local junk shop a few days before the shows. All the objects, and the table around which everyone was seated, had small spots of luminous paint on them so that the group would be able to see them in the dark. Andy placed the objects on the table, asked everyone to join hands, and extinguished the candle. The room was plunged into darkness, but the objects on the table had a slightly luminous glow. Andy slowly started to summon the nonexistent spirit of Marie Ambrose.
The group was first asked to concentrate on the wicker ball. After a few minutes, it rose a few feet into the air, moved around the séance room, and gently returned to the table. Next, they turned their attention to the maraca, which, on a good night, slowly rolled across the table. These apparently ghostly phenomena were the result of the types of simple trickery that had been used by fake mediums at the turn of the century. It soon became obvious to us that they were still capable of having an impact on a modern-day audience. We filmed many of the séances with an infrared camera, and the tapes showed that some people around the table gasped, some screamed, and many sat shaking in stony silence.
Then came the most important part of the evening: the suggestion. Andy asked Marie to make her presence known by moving the heavy table. The table remained stationary, but Andy suggested that it was levitating, using comments such as: “That’s good, Marie,” “Lift the table higher,” and “The table is moving now.” Andy then released the nonexistent spirit of Marie back into the ether, the lights were turned on, and everyone was thanked for coming to the show.
Two weeks later, our guinea pigs were sent a questionnaire about their experiences during the show. We first asked people whether they thought that any of the events they had witnessed were paranormal. Forty percent of people who had expressed a prior belief in the paranormal thought that the phenomena were the result of genuine ghostly activity, compared with only about 3 percent of disbelievers. We then examined whether the suggestion had been effective. The results were startling. More than a third described how they had seen the table levitate. Again, participants’ prior belief or disbelief in the paranormal played a key role, with half of disbelievers correctly stating that the table didn’t move versus just a third of believers. Our questionnaire also asked people whether they had had any unusual experiences during the séance. It seemed that the atmosphere we had created caused people to experience a whole range of spooky effects, with one in five reporting cold shivers, a strong sense of energy flowing through them, and a mysterious presence in the room.
The message was clear. In the same way that simple suggestion can be used to fool people into recalling illusory childhood events, so it can also make a significant proportion of people experience the impossible.
A few years after the séance show, I teamed up with a television company to explore whether the same sort of techniques could be used to create a belief in New Age mumbo-jumbo, and even persuade people to part with their hard-earned cash. Before the study started, we visited a local hardware shop and bought two objects—a brass curtain ring worth fifty pence and a chrome light-pull for two pounds. The manager of a large shopping center in Hertfordshire allowed us to carry out the study in the middle of his mall.
This initial phase of the experiment was designed to establish a baseline. We stopped people, asked them to place the brass ring or light-pull in their hands, and tell us whether they felt anything odd. Perhaps not surprisingly, no one reported a thing. It was time to introduce some suggestion. I explained to the next set of passersby that I was a psychologist, that I had designed two objects to make people feel slightly unusual, and was now road-testing the designs. Again, people placed the objects in their hands. This time the reaction was quite different. Whereas before we had encountered nothing but blank faces, now the suggestion began to play with their minds. People started to report all sorts of slightly odd effects. Some said that the objects made them feel relaxed. Others said that they caused a slight tingling sensation. Often they would get an effect with one object and not the other, and they were keen to know the difference between the two. When I asked how much they would be prepared to pay for the objects, people estimated between five and eight pounds.
So far we had employed only verbal suggestion. Now it was time to add some visual elements into the mix. I donned a white laboratory coat and bought two cheap boxes for the curtain ring and light-pull. I approached a variety of shoppers and, once again, people were kind enough to help out. I explained that I was looking for honest feedback on the two devices, which were designed to elicit some strange feelings. This time the reactions were even more extreme. One person said that the brass curtain ring made him feel high. Another said that the chrome light-pull made him feel as if his hands were magnetic and attracted toward one another. Another said that she felt as if there were electricity running through her hands. It was a dramatic demonstration of how easily suggestion can be used to part the gullible from their cash. How much were people now prepared to pay for the fifty-pence brass ring or two-pound light-pull?
The estimates ranged between fifteen and twenty-five pounds.
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BELIEVING SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST
Psychology Enters the Twilight Zone
T
he Savoy Hotel in London is famous for fine dining, attentive service, grand interiors, and, of course, a three-foot-high wooden black cat called Kaspar. In 1898, a British businessman named Woolf Joel booked a table for fourteen at the hotel. Unfortunately, one of his guests cancelled at the last moment, leaving him with just thirteen diners. Deciding to ignore the old wives’ tale that says it is unlucky to have thirteen people around a table, Woolf pressed ahead with the meal. Three weeks later, Woolf returned to South Africa, where he was shot dead in a highly publicized murder.
For decades after the incident, the Savoy didn’t allow parties of thirteen to dine at the hotel; rather than run the risk of having another murder on their hands, management went so far as to have a member of staff join any such group. In the 1920s, the hotel asked the designer Basil Lonides to produce a sculpture to replace their human good luck charm, and he created Kaspar. Since then, this beautiful Art Deco cat has been joining wealthy parties of thirteen for dinner. At each meal he attends, he is fitted with a napkin, given a full place setting, and served the same food as his table mates. Apparently, he was a firm favorite with Winston Churchill, who helped secure his return when he was kidnapped during World War II by a group of high-spirited officers dining at the hotel.
Superstitious and magical thinking pervade our lives. Not surprisingly, the topic has attracted more than its fair share of strange and unusual research. The work has involved the extensive interviewing of real-estate agents, observing fisherman in remote regions of New Guinea, playing “pass the parcel” across an entire country, secretly introducing low-frequency sound waves into classical music concerts, and having a group of people attempt to walk across sixty feet of red-hot coals. The results have revealed why much of society believes in the impossible, why strange coincidences are surprisingly likely, and why people experience ghostly goings-on in allegedly haunted buildings.
SUPERSTITIOUS MINDS