Invisible Gestures

A number of people passed along the results of this recent study that looked at Derren Brown’s psychological force for the three of diamonds. In total, when they used this force, about 18% of the people chose the three of diamonds.

We’ve tried out this force in our focus-group testing as well and while I don’t have the numbers with me, I think we got about a 15% hit rate. So about the same.

They seemed to think the results of this study showed the force to be a success. We interpreted our results as the force being something of a failure. But this is the difference between looking for results that are “statistically significant” and those that are “magically useful.”

We have looked at so many types of psychological forces over the years in our testing that I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a purely psychological force that is both reliable and invisible to the audience.

(I’d love to be proven wrong. If you believe there is, I have the infrastructure in place—once we’re back to a more normal sort of human interaction—to test it out for you. Come to NYC, I’ll put you in touch with the group I work with, and you can go out and test it for 100 real people. If it fools even just 51% of the people, I will cover the cost of the testing and your flight and accommodations. If it doesn’t, you will cover the costs.)

While I appreciate people trying to test magic methodologies scientifically, I’m not sure it’s the best approach. I say this as someone who has been involved with more magic testing than anyone in the history of the universe. If your process is a little too clinical, you’re not going to get the best feedback. In our earliest days of testing, we would try to have a process that felt very formal and “scientific.” And we found people claiming to be fooled by things at a much higher rate than we expected. It was only when we shifted our approach to being more of a “focus group” style of interaction, rather than a “scientific study” type of interaction, that we started getting the best feedback from the participants. When they saw a trick as some sort of clinical research, they tended to be very forgiving in their assessments. It was only when we made it clear that we wanted their critical analysis of an effect or a technique that we would get their true thoughts.

I’m not suggesting the more scientific studies aren’t useful, just that in my experience, it’s not the best way to test these things.

I’ve found the best use for Derren’s force in a social context is to use it as the starting point presentationally. “I’m going to try and send a card to you without saying the name of the card. You need to be very attuned and focused on me, or this isn’t going to work.” You may even have them film the process with their phone. You do the priming procedure until they name the three of diamonds. If they don’t get it immediately, you make the gestures more and more obvious until they do. At some point they’ll get it. Then you spread the deck and show them the reversed three of diamonds in the deck.

If they pick up on the force quickly you say, “You’re very good at this, let’s try something a little more challenging.”

If they don’t pick up on the force quickly you say, “I don’t think that style of non-verbal communication is a strength for you. But I have a feeling you might be more sensitive to something a little less direct.”

Either way, you continue on.

“If you were to watch back the video you just shot, you would see me indicating the three of diamonds to you via my movements and gestures. There is another way to transmit information that’s similar, but it’s not something you would pick up with a camera. It’s something called ‘Invisible Gesturing.’ Well, that’s not the technical name for it. The technical name is sub-perceptive trans-lexical kinesic communication. But the guy I learned this from just called them ‘invisible gestures.’ It’s communication that happens on a subliminal level. That sounds potentially kind of scary, but the truth is you wouldn’t be able to perceive the invisible gestures without me telling you they were coming. So it’s not like I could just walk into the grocery store and implant messages into the checkout girl’s head without her knowing.

“So let’s try it. You can record this too if you want, but there won’t be much to see when you rewatch it.”

You then “send” them the image of another card. This time using “invisible gestures.” (In other words, you don’t really do anything at all.) And incredibly they will again pick up on the card you were sending them, which you reversed in the deck (thanks to it being an invisible deck). However, this time they should truly have no understanding of how they did it.