Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Practitioners of mentalism can perform apparently impossible feats, but when performing for an audience these feats are attributed to pseudoscientific explanations such as advanced psychological skills. Research that has investigated the psychological foundations of mentalism has found a strong tendency for people to believe these explanations. In three experiments, we investigated the strength of this belief by comparing apparently impossible effects relating to mental phenomena with physical phenomena. We observed that mental magic tricks are readily explained in terms of advanced psychological skills, whereas physical tricks are not. This was true: i) even when alternative feasible explanations are explicitly presented; ii) when they are presented as mentalism effects but the effects themselves are classical card tricks; iii) regardless of the context in which the effects are observed (a research laboratory vs. a theater). We interpreted the tendency to appeal to this pseudo-explanation (and the changes in narratives employed by mentalists across the decades) in terms of the community of knowledge framework.