You Are Not So Smart
334 - Magical Thinking - Matt Tompkins (rebroadcast)
March 2, 20261h 19m · 11,640 words
Show notes
In this episode, the story of Clever Hans, the horse who changed psychology for the better. We also sit down with psychologist and magician Matt Tompkins. Matt is the author of The Spectacle of Illusion, a book about the long history of the manipulation of our own magical thinking and how studying deception can help us better understand perception, memory, belief, and more.
Highlighted moments
once the person asking the questions couldn't see the answers at all, once this person was blindfolded, Hans' accuracy dropped tremendously from 50 out of 56 correct answers to 2 out of 35
“The crucial finding, though, was the questioners, including Wilhelm von Osten, had no idea they were doing this.”
“This is a great way of starting the con, right? You say, oh, this worked on a primitive people like 10, 15, 20, 30, 100 years ago, but you as a sophisticated, enlightened member of the year of our Lord, 2025, would never fall for such primitive hokum.”
“about 30% of people that would swear confidently that there was something that the magician had made disappear. Um, about a third of those people. So about 10% would give us like very specific visual details, like a silver coin or a red ball that was held up to the camera and it caught the light.”
Transcript
Transcript not available for this episode yet.