This testing goes back to 2019 and early 2020. We never got a chance to complete it, at least not the way I envisioned it, due to covid. And while the months passed and I kept on thinking that surely we’d have the opportunity to pick up this testing again, it still feels kind of far off. So, I decided to just release the data we had collected so far, which is mostly complete. At least complete enough to draw some conclusions from, I believe.
The original question was this, “How much does turning a routine into a Spectator as Magician plot, improve the reaction to the trick?” In other words, if you take where the magician does the impressive bit (reading a mind, for example) and reframe it so that the spectator is the one doing the magic, is there a significant increase in the impact of the trick?
To test this we needed to strip the trick down to the barest elements to see if just that reframing alone was enough to make the trick stronger. We wanted to compare a “plain” magician-focused trick to a “plain” Spectator as Magician effect.
So the first effect we used was a mind-reading trick of a two-digit number.
This first part actually goes back to 2017 when we tested the trick on 24 people
12 people saw this effect:
“I want you to think of a two-digit number. Concentrate on the number and I’m going to try and read your mind.” Magician writes something down and sets pencil aside. “What number were you thinking of?” Magician reveals that number is what he wrote down.
12 people saw this effect :
“I would like you to try and read my mind. I’m going to write down a two-digit number and concentrate on it.” Magician writes down a number and sets the pencil aside. “I want you to see if you can read my mind and tell me what two-digit number I’m thinking of.” Spectator names a number and the magician reveals that’s the number he wrote down.
Now, I don’t have the data from the 2017 testing on me, but the overall rating for “strength” of the effect was almost the same regardless of which variation we were talking about. On a scale of 1-10 the Spectator as Magician version score averaged .2 points higher than the Magician-focused version. There was not a significant difference in regard to the strength of the effect.
In 2019, we had a lot more money to put towards testing and we looked at the subject again, this time with a much larger group of people. Over the course of 13 months, or so, 50 people saw the first version of the 2-digit number trick. 40 people saw the 2nd version of the 2-digit number effect (Spec as Magician version). In addition, 50 people saw a trick where the magician read their mind to know what card they were thinking of, and 40 other people had the experience where they were able to pick out the card the magician was thinking of.
None of these groups overlapped.
The people who took part in this testing also saw other tricks for various purposes while they were with us. But whichever simple trick mentioned above that they saw was the first trick they were shown and they rated it before seeing anything else. So any of the other tricks they may have seen in their testing session wouldn’t have affected the scores they gave for the effects in this testing.
This time, the effects were rated on the “impossibility” of the effect, and also how much they enjoyed the trick. Both on a scale of 1-10, where a 5 would be “average.” (Very important to understand that 5 is not bad, it’s average.). Because there was no real presentation accompanying these effects, you wouldn’t expect the “enjoyment” score to be all that high.
2-Digit Number Mind-Reading - Magician as Magician Version
Impossibility Score: 6.3
Enjoyment Score: 6
2-Digit Number Mind-Reading - Spectator as Magician Version
Impossibility Score: 6.3
Enjoyment Score: 6.2
Card Mind-Reading - Magician as Magician Version
Impossibility Score: 5.8
Enjoyment Score: 5.7
Card Mind-Reading - Spectator as Magician Version
Impossibility Score: 6.0
Enjoyment Score: 6.0
Is there anything to be learned here. At first blush, maybe not much. The numbers are all kind of bunched up in the same place. That’s not surprising, as 6-6.5 is usually where a solid but “small” trick ranks for impossibility. By “small” I mean something like knowing a number, knowing a word, a sandwich trick, a quick coin vanish. That sort of trick without much presentation usually scores in that range .
Where there is maybe something a little more interesting to look at is where we asked people to describe the effect.
Only 3 of the 40 people who saw the Spectator as Mindreader version of the 2-digit number trick described the trick as anything like a “Spectator as Mindreader” effect. One person wrote down that the effect involved him being able to know what number the magician had written down. And two other people said something like, “The magician gave me the power to read his mind.”
But almost all the other 37 responses put the power back with the magician. “The magician predicted the number I said.” “The magician knew what number I would say.” That sort of thing.
The card effect did better, with 10 out of the 40 people describing the effect in terms that somehow they were able to remove the card the magician was thinking of from the deck. And those that did describe it that way also gave somewhat higher scores for the Impossibility and Enjoyment ratings. But those scores were only slightly higher, and still only 25% of the spectators described the trick as being something they did.
So most people saw the Spectator as Magician plot as no different from the Magician-focused plot. I’ve always had my suspicions that was likely to be the case, but I was still surprised how few people described the effect as being something they had a hand in. Now, if I had to guess, I think if we really drilled down with these people they would remember that the effect was supposed to be them doing the mind-reading. But I think it’s so transparent a ruse that they were perhaps embarrassed to describe it that way. (It would be like if Kareem Abdul-Jabbar picked you up so you could stuff the ball through the hoop, you’d be embarrassed to say to people, “Oh yeah, I can dunk.”)
So just telling someone, “You’re doing this!” Doesn’t actually reframe the effect in most people’s minds. Unfortunately, in many Spectator as Magician effects, there is little going on besides the switching of cause and effect. (From, “I’m going to write down the number you’re thinking” to “You’re going to think of the number I wrote down,” for example.) And I think people either just fail to see the difference or they just don’t bother putting any credence into it.
I do think the Spectator as Magician/Mentalist plot can be very strong, and I’ve laid out how I go about making it the most powerful I can in this post. Basically you need to do something so that the experience feels abnormal for the spectator (you’ll see the details in that post). You need to give them a new/different sensation that they can then associate with the act of reading someone’s mind (or whatever the effect is). Without that sensation they just feel completely normal, yet you’re telling them they did something they know they can’t do. You need to give them something different to latch onto as being part of this experience which leads to this temporary ability to do whatever.
That’s the best way I’ve found to let the spectator really feel like maybe they’ve done something out of the ordinary and to wring the greatest impact out of Spectator as Magician effects.
