334 - Magical Thinking - Matt Tompkins (rebroadcast)

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1:00Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart podcast, episode 334.

1:30This is the You Are Not So Smart podcast. My name is David McCraney, and I would like to tell you a story about a horse. In the late 1800s, in a time of Ferris wheels and boater hats and vaudevillian stage performances,

2:03in an era marking the early days of cinema, industrialization, and electricity. A time when the telegraph, the automobile, incandescent lights, and vaccines were changing the world, and the theory of evolution by natural selection was creating a paradigm shift in science and medicine. A German math teacher gained international fame, claiming that he had taught a horse to read, spell, tell time, understand a calendar, and yes, add, subtract, multiply, and divide.

2:53As the 19th century came to a close, math teacher, phrenologist, and amateur horse trainer Wilhelm von Osten gathered large crowds in Berlin and across Germany with his incredible stallion known as Clever Hans. Crowds gathered so large that Osten, Hans, and those crowds all once appeared in the New York Times, in a time when a horse act would need to be rather impressive to make it into a newspaper across the ocean.

3:25News of Clever Hans' incredible, almost human intelligence, wowed people far and wide, so much so that Wilhelm von Osten and his horse would go on to change psychology forever. Just not in the way he likely intended.

3:57A key element of the Clever Hans demonstration was the fact that Wilhelm von Osten usually used some sort of placard or blackboard, a piece of paper or some other prop like that, with a series of potential answers written on it. For instance, if he asked Clever Hans to answer a math problem, von Osten would show a few wrong answers and a single correct answer on the board to Hans and to the crowd, and then von Osten would point at these one at a time

4:31until Clever Hans clomped his hoof on the ground, indicating that this was his selection. And then everyone would gasp, they would yell, they would applaud. Wilhelm von Osten would exclaim in delight. Hans would seem pretty pleased with himself. And on it would go like this with questions about how to spell certain words, how to divide complex fractions and problems like, if the eighth day of the month comes on a Tuesday, what is the date of the following Friday?

5:04On the board, Wilhelm would offer Wednesday the 9th, Thursday the 10th, Friday the 11th. And as his pointing finger came close to the 11th, Hans would stomp a few times, and there it was. Wow! This horse understands language, the calendar, math. Amazing! Osten never charged admission for these demonstrations, and the crowds grew large because of this, and word got around as he traveled from town to town.

5:37And that's when, unbelievably, the German Board of Education got involved. You see, to put this into some context, around this time, thanks to evolution by natural selection becoming an incredibly popular topic of conversation, the idea that human intelligence didn't just appear one day but evolved over time from more primitive, animalistic origins was a fresh and tantalizing concept.

6:09The notion, then, that maybe the animals all around us, like birds and apes and dogs and perhaps also horses, were in some way intelligent by degrees comparable to humans and in ways we had not yet considered, was also a fresh and tantalizing concept. But also, around this time, mesmerism and mentalism and spiritualism had risen in popularity, giving us a surge in acceptance of fortune-telling

6:41and seances and paranormal, Ouija boards, automatic writing, hypnotism, psychics, telepathy, and alternative forms of religiosity. Mary Todd Lincoln even held seances in the White House. And, also, this was a time in which professional magicians and escape artists and other masters of stagecraft like Houdini and Howard Thurston and Joseph Dunniger had become enormously popular. And as professional deceivers,

7:11they couldn't help but notice the similarities to what they did knowingly and openly as tricks to what many of these so-called mediums and psychics were doing fraudulently and exploitatively. So, they used their fame to demonstrate the trickery involved in all of the above when it was used to scam people. So, a sort of professional debunking movement was afoot. And, also, at this time,

7:42psychology was entering the scene and becoming a very popular and exciting new science, especially in Germany. Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt, Sigmund Freud, in Austria, they, too, were debunking all manner of mystical and pseudoscientific claims having to do with the mind. They also were adding some pseudoscientific claims, but all that would get worked out later. And, one of the ways these people, concerned with the art and practice and belief and susceptibility to deception,

8:13converged was via the recently identified aspect of the human unconscious, known as the ideomotor effect, so named in 1852 by zoologist William Benjamin Carpenter, who, to his credit, tried to name this the Carpenter effect, but ideomotor is what caught on. What is the ideomotor effect? Well, that's when the unconscious mind, through involuntary movement of muscles, responds to thoughts, expectations, or suggestions,

8:45and does stuff without your conscious awareness. We can move our bodies without conscious intention, without knowing we're doing it. For instance, if you hold a pendulum on a string, it will begin to rotate and sway. All thanks to unconscious and barely perceptible muscle movements. And, there's a form of supposedly communicating with the dead that involves holding a pendulum on a string above words or letters on a board. But, as experiments had revealed,

9:18the person holding the string was unconsciously moving it. And, in so doing, not only deceiving others, but deceiving themselves.

9:38Psychologists of the time had found that the unconscious and involuntary aspects of the ideomotor effect explained Ouija boards, dowsing rods, and table turning. During seances, people would sit around a table with their hands placed on the surface of the table, and then they waited for spirits to begin turning the table beneath them. In all these cases, people were unconsciously moving their bodies in ways that appeared to be directed by something outside of them.

10:13Unaware they were the culprits, they instead attributed these sorts of things to the work of ghosts and all manner of otherworldly forces.

10:28Psychology, stage magic, spiritualism, it all came together in a new wave of empirical debunking of the paranormal during a time when the world was fascinated with the prospect of animal intelligence. Which brings us back to the Hans Commission put together by the German Board of Education.

11:02Psychologist Karl Stumpf was skeptical of clever Hans mainly because the demonstrations used props and techniques that seemed awfully similar to the sort of thing you'd find in a seance or as part of a stage mesmerism act. So he formed a panel of 13 people, among them a veterinarian, a circus manager, and a zoologist, and they created a series of experiments to be conducted by another German psychologist, Oskar Funxt.

11:33Wilhelm von Osten told the commission he truly believed in his horse, and so he agreed to the experiments. And then, in 1907, Funxt and Stumpf performed all those experiments that he had agreed to, and after all of these were complete, they had thoroughly debunked the wonder that was clever Hans, thanks to the application of double-blind testing.

12:04Here's what they did. First, they isolated clever Hans. No crowd of spectators. Next, they had other people question Hans, not just von Osten, and then they progressively moved the questioners farther and farther away. And then finally, the crucial ingredient, they sometimes blindfolded the questioner so the person asking the questions could not see the correct answers. And they sometimes used horse blinders

12:36so Hans couldn't see their faces or their hands. So what did they find? Well, Hans only gave correct answers when the questioner knew the answer and could see the answer. Moving farther away dropped Hans' rate a bit, but 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

13:07to 2 out of 35, all the way down to levels equivalent to random chance. What Stump's commission had discovered was Hans was reading the facial expressions and body language of the humans, and the humans were unknowingly, unconsciously slightly altering their faces, eyes, bodies, arms, hands, even their breathing as they approached or glanced at or noticed or paid attention to

13:39what would be the correct answer in each situation. The crucial finding, though, was the questioners, including Wilhelm von Osten, had no idea they were doing this. All this time he had been unaware he was influencing clever Hans. He believed he was observing independent agency and intelligence in much the same way people in other situations were attributing their movements to telepathy

14:10or the power of the undead. And after a year and a half of study, the commission concluded that although Hans wasn't actually reading, spelling, or doing the arithmetic, there was no real hoax involved here. It wasn't a true fraud because it was a case of self-deception more than anything. That self-deception led to the deception of others, sure, but it was self-deception that was driving all of it.

14:41In fact, Hans was so observant that even once all of this was out in the open and understood, Fungst and Stumpf attempted to hide their unconscious cues when they repeated the demonstration as the questioners. And even when they attempted to completely hide any possibility of cueing, Hans picked up on something. If they knew the answer, clever Hans could pick up on their almost microscopic changes

15:12in movements and breathing and so on in the presence of the correct response versus the incorrect one. No matter how hard they attempted to keep a poker face and a poker body. And this is how Wilhelm von Osteen and clever Hans changed psychology forever. We now call this the clever Hans phenomenon. Still, to this day, this is when an animal or person appears to perform a complex task,

15:43especially one presumably outside their abilities, but is actually responding to subtle, unintentional cues from an observer. And one element of this, which would go on to be the crucial ingredient in so many other experiments, is that when someone is cueing someone else or someone is moving their body in some way that seems to lead to an outcome that couldn't possibly be coming from themselves, it can very much

16:14be coming from themselves. You can be doing something like this unconsciously and unknowingly. And that's what happens in the case of Ouija boards and table turning. You don't need a clever Hans picking up on cues in those situations. You only need yourself. You only need self-deception.

16:35And thanks to the knowledge of this effect, double blinding became a vital part of psychological experimentation. It became an established safeguard in the field. When studying behavior, face-to-face contact between the examiner and the examined must be avoided. And when studying something like facilitated communication where someone in a coma or otherwise nonverbal is assisted by another person holding their hand

17:06and guiding it toward letters on a keyboard, you must have double blind controls in place. The person doing the facilitating must be unable to see what the other person is seeing during the experiment. When you add controls like that, the astonishing, incredible, unbelievable outcomes they vanish. They vanish. They vanish. They vanish.

18:01After the commission finished their testing and eventual debunking, Wilhelm von Osten returned to his life as a math teacher. Clever Hans, however, was drafted into the military to serve in World War I where he would meet his noble end in the year 1916.

18:27I love the story of Clever Hans. I love that Wilhelm von Osten wasn't attempting to fool anyone. He truly believed. He was truly unaware of his unconscious cueing. This is what makes the Clever Hans case a landmark moment in scientific skepticism. It demonstrated that even intelligent, honest people can unknowingly deceive themselves and others. A lesson that remains deeply relevant today.

18:57It illustrates our propensity to generate rationalizations and justifications for mysterious and seemingly otherworldly phenomena. And it demonstrates our propensity for magical thinking in the explanations and narratives it can produce. I also love that it's the story of how magicians and psychologists have had overlapping interests from the very beginning when it comes to magical thinking

19:28especially the sort that leads to deception and self-deception. The commission put together by psychologist Carl Stumpf coincided with the efforts of Harry Houdini the famed magician who worked to debunk mediums who claimed to speak with dead loved ones for a price. And he also worked to debunk miracle workers who claimed to heal illnesses with their superpowers for a price and fortune tellers

19:58and psychics who claimed to be able to predict the future and contact lost relatives for a price and a bevy of other charlatans and con artists who depended on our vulnerability human vulnerability to magical thinking to deceive the vulnerable and take their money.

20:20Magicians and psychologists have been collaborating ever since the earliest days of psychology and they've been debunking all manner of magical thinking for more than a hundred years and they continue to do this to this day. As the world famous magician skeptic and professional debunker James Randi once said quote magicians are the most honest people in the world. They tell you they're going to fool you and then they do it. End of quote.

20:51Magicians deceive on purpose knowingly for a living. Thanks to their expertise and experience they know how easy it is to fall for what in another context would be considered magic tricks and they know people can not only fall for these things unknowingly but perpetuate them unknowingly especially when you're vulnerable especially when you're grieving or desperate for hope and I understand I empathize my heart reaches out I have compassion

21:21for this and so did they and that's why the list of magicians who have gone on to become professional debunkers is very long. Houdini, James Randi, Penn and Teller, Brian Brushwood, Darren Brown, The Amazing Kreskin, Millborn Christopher, Joseph Dunniger, Martin Dunniger, Martin Gardner, Theodore Annaman, James Marks, Bob Steiner, Richard Wiseman, Ian Rollin, Mark Edward, Danny Coram, Paul Zenon and that's not all of them. James Randi even famously

21:51offered the $1 million paranormal challenge, a $1 million payout to anyone who could demonstrate a supernatural or paranormal ability under scientific testing conditions and more than a thousand people attempted to earn that million dollars and none were successful.

22:10I was reminded of all of this recently when I was invited to speak at the annual conference of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. I joined the stage alongside other guests like physicist Brian Cox and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and neurologist Stephen Novella and the mind-reading magician who goes by the stage name Banachek. While there I met up with Daniel Simons who was also attending and he's one of the psychologists behind the Invisible Gorilla Experiment. He was the very first

22:41guest of this podcast in the very first episode. He was there because he loves magic and skepticism and the science of self-deception. There are a lot of psychologists like that. The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry was once known as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and as a non-profit that's what they've done since the 1970s. Quote, promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation and the use of reason

23:12in examining controversial and extraordinary claims. End quote. Simons and others that I met at that conference, they had all noticed an excerpt from Carl Sagan's book, The Demon Haunted World, which is all about critical thinking and how the scientific method freed us from a lot of magical thinking. An excerpt from that book was going viral again. That book was published in 1995 and in the excerpt,

23:42which you have likely run across by now, it's all over social media, Sagan says he has a foreboding of a time in the near future when, quote, the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority. When clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good

24:13and what's true, we slide almost without noticing back into superstition and darkness. End quote. In this age of AI and the internet and electric cars and autonomous drones and smartphones and cryptocurrency and instant access to all the knowledge ever created, there's been a resurgence of UFOs and demons and ghost hunting, ESP, cryptozoology,

24:43telepathy, faith healing, Reiki, astrology, water memory, remote viewing, tarot, energy healing, horoscopes, telekinesis, and every other form of magical thinking imaginable. Magical thinking has found new audiences through new technology. And I realized that I was being strongly naive when I had assumed that after more than a hundred years of debunking and appeals to skepticism,

25:14appeals to critical thinking, dozens and dozens of books books on this topic. We were done with all this. That was what I was being naive about. I thought we were done with all of this. My assumption that I lived in a future where magical thinking was so easily debunked and had been debunked for so long that it was a thing of the past was for me, in essence, a pretty

25:45clear example of, on my part, self-deception. How easy it feels like it ought to be to debunk this stuff is very clearly an illusion. Because as long as these illusory things have been cropping up in society, you've also had people that are very actively debunking them. That is the voice of Matt Tompkins, an Oxford educated psychologist and a magician who scientifically studies deception and self-deception.

26:17Currently, my job, the elevator pitch, is a fun one. I design and implement fake mind control devices for the Swedish government. More specifically, he is a postdoctoral researcher at Lund University's Choice Blindness Lab, where he is working on a project that involves adapting techniques from mentalism and magic to study how people perceive and misperceive emerging technologies related to neuroscience and AI. And I met

26:47psychologist Matt Tompkins through Daniel Simons, who I mentioned earlier. I told Dan I would like to do an episode of the show about magical thinking, and Simons said he knew just the person, a psychologist who not only studies this sort of thing, but who literally wrote the book on it. In that book, The Spectacle of Illusion, Tompkins investigates the long history of deception by mesmerists, magicians, and fraudulent mystics, and how a thorough understanding of how they manipulate us

27:18via our own magical thinking can help us better understand the hardcore science of human perception, memory, belief, and more. And we will get into all of that in a moment. But my first question for Tompkins was what he thought about the fact that despite all our advancements in technology, despite 100 plus years of scientific debunking, it seems like magical thinking is back again. In fact, it seems like

27:48it never went anywhere. So, I mean, one observation as someone who gets very into both the contemporary echoes and the historical trends of this and hangs out with people in history and media studies quite a bit, is that this idea that we're past it and, oh no, it's back again, that is a recurring motif for every couple of years. Like, if you look back on the way things are reported, like, probably on a yearly basis

28:19at least, if not monthly, there's an article that's like, oh no, astrology is back, we thought it was gone. Anytime you get any kind of shift in the media landscape, people adapt into it, so now you can get apps for it, right? Like, it was the thing, when the internet came around, there were websites for it, when TV was around, it was a big thing that it was coming on TV, before that it was radio, before that it was like print media. Every time you get a shift, you get people adapting to it, you get these same very, or at least very similar patterns of kind

28:49of cons, deception and self-deception. Okay, if I'm hearing you correctly, are you saying that this is just part of the human condition, this is just how people work, and it's just, there's always going to be some low simmer background radiation of magical thinking out there, which also means there will always be con artists and other people who maybe actually believe because of the, and they're in a dynamic where both sides can be

29:19tricking each other. There will be people making money off of it, there will be people trying to gain status and prestige off of it, and there will just be a low simmer of that, and no matter what technological things come along, it's just going to be back there all the time. Is this what I'm hearing? I mean, and seek meaning in it, so I agree that the late stage capitalism horror show of it is also a particular thing these days, but yeah, no, I would say, and also an interesting thing for me is this

29:50idea that we must surely be past 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. And then you go into the same thing, and it works because you've reframed it. after the

30:30break, we sit down with psychologist, magician, and expert on deception and self-deception, Matt Tompkins, to discuss his book and his research as a psychologist and the history of the psychology illusion, misdirection, perception, and magical thinking. All that, after this.

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