Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Magicians often rely on misdirection to fool their audience. Acommon way to achieve this is for the magician to provide aplausible and intuitive (but false) account of how an effect isperformed in order to prevent spectators from uncovering thetruth. We hypothesized that analytical thinkers would be morelikely than intuitive thinkers to seek alternative explanationswhen observing a mental magic effect because generating acoherent explanation requires analytical thought. We foundthat while intuitive thinkers often espoused explanations for amagic trick similar to one provided by the magician,analytical thinkers tended to generate new explanations thatechoed rational principles and relied on physical mechanisms(rather than mental capabilities). This difference was notpredicted by differences in numeracy skills or need forcognition.