Influencing choice without awareness

• We examined how magicians subtly influence audience’s decisions.
• A magician flipped through a deck of cards while participants chose a card.
• The magician influenced their choice almost every time without them noticing.
• Properties of the cards and participants’ personalities predicted card choice.
• We combined real-world and laboratory studies to examine magic.

Forcing occurs when a magician influences the audience’s decisions without their awareness. To investigate the mechanisms behind this effect, we examined several stimulus and personality predictors. In Study 1, a magician flipped through a deck of playing cards while participants were asked to choose one. Although the magician could influence the choice almost every time (98%), relatively few (9%) noticed this influence. In Study 2, participants observed rapid series of cards on a computer, with one target card shown longer than the rest. We expected people would tend to choose this card without noticing that it was shown longest. Both stimulus and personality factors predicted the choice of card, depending on whether the influence was noticed. These results show that combining real-world and laboratory research can be a powerful way to study magic and can provide new methods to study the feeling of free will.