Expertise in magicians – testing the insight hypothesis.

Over the past two decades an abundance of research has examined the psychological mechanisms underpinning magic effects in order to gain new insights into human cognition. As part of this endeavour, it has been suggested that the experience of performing tricks in front of live audiences has given magicians unique insights. The aim of the present paper was to examine the nature of this expertise and investigate the extent to which magicians understand non-magicians’ beliefs about magic and the effectiveness of specific magic principles. In Experiment 1 we describe the skills that magicians believe make them experts, and the type of feedback that magicians use to help evaluate their performance. In Experiment 2 we assess magicians’ beliefs about the popularity of different magic genres and laypeople’s understanding of different principles of deception. In the final experiment we directly test the insight hypothesis by evaluating magician knowledge of how impressed participants would be with a particular effect. We argue that the art of conjuring provides a valuable domain to study a wide range of psychological principles, and that magicians’ expertise can be used for empirical investigations. We do however question whether magicians truly understand the psychological mechanisms that underpin their illusions.