BY BETHANY LINDSAY, POSTMEDIA NEWS
Can questions about something as fundamental as the existence of free will be answered with a simple magic trick?
It may sound strange, but a new study from researchers in Vancouver and Montreal uses magicians' mind tricks as a gateway to exploring human consciousness and decision-making. In a street magic experiment, lead author Jay Olson asked 118 strangers to pick a random card as he riffled through the pack, intentionally showing one card for longer than the rest.
The results were remarkable.
Ninety-eight per cent of people picked the target card, and an impressive 91 per cent believed that they had made that choice freely, without any influence from the magician.
"It was pretty cool," said co-author Ronald Rensink, a psychology and computer science professor at the University of British Columbia. "This would seem to be supporting the view that your conscious mind doesn't really decide.
"It's the non-conscious mind that makes the decision-making. ... Your conscious mind, some people would argue, only vetoes the selection."
Magicians have been exploiting the unconscious mind for centuries to create a sense of wonder in their audiences, and that makes magic a perfect vehicle for studying psychology, according to co-author Alym Amlani, a magician and accounting professor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
"We're now able to tap into the effects that have been, for lack of a better word, fooling people for years.
"We're in a position now that we can better understand why they work," Amlani said. "For everyday people, it's just incredible that we can actually have our decisions influenced outside of our awareness."
The researchers also attempted to replicate the results from the street magic experiment in the lab using a computer program that showed participants a series of 26 images of cards. The target card was shown for about three times as long as the rest.
Participants in this part of the study chose the target card in 30 per cent of the trials. That result isn't as jaw-dropping as what the researchers saw on the street, but it is still significant, Rensink said.
"I was just happy to get our foot in the door. It could be with better timing parameters we could get a stronger effect," he said.
"Or it could be there's something about the social interaction with the magician."
Recent years have seen an increase in research focused on both "magic" and decision-making, according to Rensink, and the results of studies like this could have wide implications.
"If you're an advertiser, for example, you really want to appeal to the non-conscious mind, that part of the viewer, instead of making a formal argument," he said. "It's both kind of cool and kind of scary."
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