The Psychology of Magic

What happens when three psychologists walk into a magic show? What’s Angela’s problem with the word “talent”?  And why does LeBron James refer to himself in the third person?

SOURCES:

• John Bargh, professor of psychology at Yale University.
• Derren Brown, mentalist.
• Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford University.
• Daniel Kahneman, professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University.
• Ethan Kross, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.
• Barbara Mellers, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.
• Daniel Southwick, visiting professor of psychology at Brigham Young University and former N.F.L. quarterback.
• Lior Suchard, mentalist.

RESOURCES:

• "4 Ways to Get Into the Magic Castle," by Stephanie Breijo (TimeOut, 2023).
• "The Trouble With Talent: Semantic Ambiguity in the Workplace," by Daniel A. Southwick, Zhaoying V. Liu, Chayce Baldwin, Abigail L. Quirk, Lyle H. Ungar, Chia-Jung Tsay, and Angela L. Duckworth (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2023).
• "A Decade of Power Posing: Where Do We Stand?" by Tom Loncar (The Psychologist, 2021).
• "Influencing Choices With Conversational Primes: How a Magic Trick Unconsciously Influences Card Choices," by Alice Pailhès and Gustav Kuhn (PNAS, 2020).
• "If You Want Your Marketing Campaign To Succeed, Choose Your Words Carefully," by Allan Hug (Forbes, 2019).
• "What's Next for Psychology's Embattled Field of Social Priming," by Tom Chivers (Nature, 2019).
• "Silent Third Person Self-Talk Facilitates Emotion Regulation," by Christopher Bergland (Psychology Today, 2017).
• "Disputed Results a Fresh Blow for Social Psychology," by Alison Abbott (Scientific American, 2013).
• "A Proposal to Deal With Questions About Priming Effects," email by Daniel Kahneman (2012).
• "Behavioral Priming: It's All in the Mind, but Whose Mind?" by Stéphane Doyen, Olivier Klein, Cora-Lise Pichon, and Axel Cleeremans (PLoS One, 2012).
• Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman (2011).