Andy Luttrell - Psychology for the Mentalist

Metacognition Metacognition refers to "thoughts about one's thoughts:'The research in this area has some compelling implications for interesting premises in mentalism. In particular, it's interesting to consider how people treat their own thoughts and the implications of this treatment. There are several dimensions on which metacognitions can vary; for example, people can think about their thoughts in terms of how much they like or dislike them, where they perceive their thoughts to originate (i.e., from within their own minds vs. from common cultural beliefs), whether their thoughts are good or bad, and how confident a person is in the validity of his or her thoughts (Wagner, Bririol, & Petty, 2012). Two individuals might have the very same thoughts in response to a film they just saw, but one person may perceive their thoughts to be relatively invalid, so those thoughts won't inform his overall judgment of the movie. Thoughts-As-Objects Technique As an illustrative example, I will review a recently published set of studies with interesting implications for how people can take their thoughts and turn them into material objects. Some proponents of mindfulness-based therapies have suggested that thoughts can be treated as material objects (Brown, Ryan, & Creswell, 2007). This allows clients to separate themselves from their thoughts by treating those thoughts more objectively. In a recent series of studies testing the application of this approach to attitudes, Bririol, Petty, Gasco, and Horcajo (2013) asked people to write down either positive or negative thoughts about Mediterranean diets. Upon doing so, they were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. I n one, they were asked to take the paper on which they wrote their thoughts and place it in a trash can, "throwing away" their thoughts. In the other condition, they were asked to take the paper on which they wrote their thoughts, fold it up, and keep it in a safe place -100-

such as their pocket, wallet, or purse. In the third, control condition, participants were asked to merely fold the corners of the paper on which they wrote their thoughts and leave the paper on the table. After performing one of these actions, all participants then rated their attitudes regarding the Mediterranean diet. As expected, results indicate that when people in the control condition were asked to generate positive (vs. negative) thoughts about the topic, they later reported more positive (vs. negative) overall opinions of the topic. How thoughts were treated (as if they were material objects), however, had a significant impact on how those thoughts influenced attitudes. For people who kept their written thoughts close to them, those thoughts had a more pronounced effect on attitudes than in the control condition. In contrast, for people who placed their written thoughts in the trash, the effect of the thoughts on attitudes was attenuated compared to the control group. This business of when and how thoughts guide judgments can be confusing, but the take-away point is that how people treated the physical representation of their thoughts influenced how they used their thoughts in forming a judgment. When you throw away or destroy the material version of your thoughts, it's as though you invalidate the thoughts and as such, those thoughts are not used to come to a decision. However, when you keep your thoughts close, you imbue those thoughts with greater importance and validity, using them even more when coming to a decision. An example of what it means to see your thoughts as "valid" and then to use them in forming a judgment, consider the experience of watching a movie. Let's say I'm watching The Godfather, and as I watch it, I have thoughts like, "The acting is really good!" Later, when you ask me if I thought The Godfather was a good movie, I will say "yes" but only if I trust those thoughts I was having. If I don't trust those thoughts (e.g., if I don't know anything about filmmaking or I hear that other people disagreed with me), then I might hem and haw and say it was only okay even though the thoughts I was having were extremely favorable. In the land of billets, center tears, and impression devices, the -101-

presentational impact of these studies are obvious. People often wonder how to justify making people write down a thought that they will later reveal. As a presentational device, this may offer an intriguing justification that can be woven into a broader narrative for the performance. Consider a routine in which two people write down a thought, but one of these is burned and one of them is placed in safe keeping. You can of course reveal both thoughts, but the individual experiences can vary between the two participants. You might also apply these results to genuinely create a different experience for someone in a thought reading performance by paying special attention to how you treat the physical representation of the participant's personal thoughts. -102-

Name Letter Preferences On the whole, people generally have positive views of themselves. As a consequence, it turns out, this positive self-regard can translate to a subtle preference for the letters in one's own name. That is, since my initials are "AL;' I have a particular affinity for those letters. Someone whose initials are "JG," on the other hand, wouldn't necessarily care much for "A" or "L'' but would instead be drawn to Js and Gs. This is what's become known as name letter preferences or the "name letter effect:' In a first demonstration of this, Nuttin (1985) designed a special set of stimuli for each of his participants based on the letters in their names. He told these participants that they would be simply rating the attractiveness of a random set of symbols. In the actual procedure, each participant was presented with a sequence of letter pairs. For each pair of letters, they simply indicated which one they preferred. What the participants didn't realize, however, was that each pair contained one letter that was in the person's own name and one letter that was not in the person's own name. The results revealed a clear preference for the letters in one's own name over letters not in one's own name, and these patterns existed both for letters in the first name and letters in the last name. Interestingly, and consistent with the introspection illusion (page 69), when people participate in this task, even though they are biased toward the letters in their names, they do not realize the reason for that preference. For example, in a follow-up study, Nuttin (1987) actually asked 100 people to figure out the pattern that governed which letters were being presented and even offered a monetary reward if they could figure it out. Nobody was able to guess that the letters had anything to do with their names. This preference for one's own name letters has been shown many times and even in many different languages (Nuttin, 1987; Hoorens et al., 1990). There seem to be a few trends in these effects that are worth mentioning. -103-

First, the patterns are stronger for first names (and especially first initials) than last names. Second, the effect is stronger among women than among men. However, some evidence suggests that for men, the preference favors one's last name, likely because men usually keep the same last name for their whole lives whereas women usually change their last names (e.g., Kitayama & Karasawa, 1997). Third, the instructions for the task tend to emphasize that people should use their intuitions in making the judgments of how attractive the letters are. That is, they are told to go with their first spontaneous impressions, not take too long to make the judgments, and to let their feelings guide them. Finally, the effect also depends on one's level of self-esteem (see Koo le & Pelham, 2003). As I mentioned earlier, this effect is likely due to the positive regard people have for themselves, but this means that the effect is weaker among people with lower self-esteem. That is, people with higher self-esteem show a much stronger preference for their name letters than people with lower self-esteem. In fact-and this may be getting a little more technical than I need to- it is one's implicit self-esteem that reflects these name letter preferences. In other words, how much self-esteem people say they have may not relate to the strength of the letter preferences, but it's the self-esteem they experience automatically (maybe even unconsciously) that's reflected in these preferences. Okay, great. So people li ke their names, but what does this really mean? Well, there is some interesting research that shows just how deep these personal name affi nities can run, and I think these results could make an engaging mentalism presentation. In 2002, Brett Pelham and his colleagues reported 10 studies in a paper titled "Why Susie Sells Seashells by t he Seashore:' In it, they use data from census surveys, social security records, and other national databases to show that our names can bias us toward certain outcomes. In Study 4, for example, they examined social security records for people who died in the Southeast United States. They identified several common names t hat linguistically resemble the names of -104-

southern states and looked to see if people whose names matched state names were disproportionately likely to have lived there. Amazingly, the data support this relationship; there were up to 44% more people who lived in states that matched their names than you wou Id expect by cha nee alone. That is, Georges were disproportionately likely to live in Georgia, Louises were disproportionately likely to live in Louisiana, and Kenneths were disproportionately likely to live in Kentucky (among other name-state matches). These patterns remain even after controlling for age factors 12 and ethnic factors. Another study looking at"Saint" cities shows the same patterns: people named Paul are disproportionately likely to live in St. Paul, and people named Louis are disproportionately likely to live in St. Louis. Of course, it's possible that what is really happening is that people who live in Virginia are just more likely to name their daughter "Virginia:' To account for this, the researchers also took a separate measure of not just who lived in these states but who had moved to these states. Indeed, it's the case that people seem to move to states similar to their own names at rates higher than chance. As another way to account for this, though, in other studies the researchers look at people's last names because these are much less likely to have been chosen based on a location. The results with surnames are much the same: there are more people with the surname "Ohi" in Ohio and there are more people with the surname "Hammond" in Hamilton, Canada than you'd expect by chance. In the final three studies that they report, Pelham et al. (2002) turn their attention to another place where name similarity might matter: occupations. They find similar patterns for occupations as they did with locations: there are more people in a given profession whose names resemble the name of the profession itself at rates higher than chance. For example, there are more people named "Dennis" and "Denise" who are dentists than you'd expect by chance, and there are more people named "Lawrence" and "Laura" who are lawyers than 12 This could have been a potential confound. For example, if people named "Florence" are more likely to be older, and people who live in Florida are also more likely to older, then there would be a particularly high proportion of Florences in Florida just because of both variables' associations with age. -105-

you'd expect by chance. Another interesting study looked at people in the geosciences (geographers, geologists, etc.) and compared "Geo" names like "George" and "Geoffrey" to equally common non-"Geo" names like "Daniel" and "Pete:' The data show that among professionals in the geosciences, there are more Georges than Daniels and more Geoffreys than Petes, even though in the general population, those pairs of names are equally common. To take it one step further and to bring it back to simple Jetter preferences, the researchers also considered people whose first names merely began with G vs. people whose first names began with T (in the general population, there are about as many people with "G" names as "T" names). Once again, despite their equality in the general public, there are more geoscientists whose first names start with G than whose first names start with T. 13 Subsequent research has extended these consequences to more social domains. That is, we like people more when their names are similar to our own. Jones et al. (2004), for example examined marriage records in the United States and looked for name matches between partners. They found consistent patterns wherein, for example, there are more married couples who share first initials (e.g., Steve and Sarah) than you'd expect by chance. In another study and an even stricter test of the hypotheses, they examined only people whose pre-marriage last names were one of the five most common surnames. T he results show another matching effect: people whose last names are "Smith" are more likely to marry another "Smith" than they are to marry a Williams, Johnson, Jones, or Brown. By the same token, people whose last names are "Jones" are more likely to marry another "Jones" than they are to marry a Smith, Williams, Johnson, or Brown. The same was true for all of the surname matches. Finally, the attraction we have to the letters in our own names further extends to how likely we are to comply with someone's request. In one of the more devastatingly simple manipu lations of compliance, Garner (2005) simply manipulated the name of a person making a request. He mailed a survey to 100 people and asked them to consider 13 As with the first simple name lener prefe ences many of these studies-both locations of residence and chosen profession-shows stro ger panerns for women than for men. -106-

completing the questionnaire and mailing it back within 1 O days using an enclosed envelope. Critically, half of the surveys that were sent included a cover letter signed by a member of the research team, whom the recipients were unlikely to know, but the other half of the surveys included a cover letter signed by someone whose name was similar to the recipient. These were customized for each participant so that someone named "Robert Greer" might receive a survey from a "Bob Gregar," and someone named "Cindy Johansson" might receive a survey from a "Cynthia Johnson:' When the surveys started coming back, the data painted a clear picture: compliance was greater when the request was being made by someone with a similar name. Whereas only 20% of the control questionnaires were completed and returned, 38% of the questionnaires sent by someone with a similar name to the recipient were completed and returned. The take-away point? People are drawn to their own names. Through many studies, we now know that people think the letters in their names are more attractive than letters not in their names, they move to places whose names are similar to their own, they choose professions whose names are similar to their own, they marry people with the same first initials or the same last names, and they help people more when their names are similar to their own. Name Letter Force I began playing with this psychological force when thinking about the research on name letter preferences. It also incorporates a couple other psychological concepts, meant to nudge people toward the preferred answer. In fact, the name letter component need not be present if you so choose since the letters in this seem to work quite well as it is. Here is the force ... This quick experiment may seem a little strange, but I just want to get a quick impression of how you perceive the alphabet. On the other side of this card, I wrote a few letters, and I want you to do is provide your first -107-

intuitive impression of which one you like the best. You turn over the card and the following letters are written on it: Q A w G Which one do you like? Just pick one. In this example, it's statistically likely that people will choose the A. When I ran a short on line survey to test the effectiveness of this force, 21 of the 29 participants chose the letter A. This, of course, is in the suboptimal conditions of an online survey where people need not actually feel pressure to provide a first impression. In performance conditions, this figure should be higher, but these data provide at least initial evidence of its effectiveness. This force was designed with a few principles in mind: Fluency: As described elsewhere in this book, fluency of perception provokes a feeling of liking. Because "A" is a much more common letter in the alphabet, compared to "O:"'W;' and "G;' it is more familiar (see "mere exposure"), easier to process, and thus more attractive. Position Effects: The force letter is not placed on the ends, a position effect that has been demonstrated elsewhere in the mentalism literature (see Banachek's Psychological Subleties). The online data I have collected also show that this particular ordering of the letters produces the most reliable preference for the force letter. Name Letter Effect: Similar to the fluency explanation, these letters were also chosen with the Name Letter Effect in mind. In consulting the data on the most common names in the U.S., "A" is very common letter in these names whereas "Q""W;' and "G" are quite uncommon. What makes this force particularly interesting is the name letter component. The "A" in the list of letters can be swapped out for the first letter in the participant's name-especially when the name begins with a relatively common letter. In the course of introductions, you will know the first initial of the person's name. Let's say you're performing for Jennifer. You would write out"Q J W G" on the card -108-

and follow the same procedure. The chances are that the force will hit and Jennifer will pick "J" even if she doesn't realize it's because of a name letter effect (see the "introspection illusion"). When the personalized version of this force hits, you have a perfect transition into a name letter effect explanation and corresponding effect. I like to do the force by writing these letters on the outside of an envelope. Inside is an index card on which I've written "You will pick your first initial:'This allows me to reveal a logical prediction and support the prediction by describing the amazing research showing that people named "Dennis" are especially likely to become dentists and so forth. You can then have the person think of a different name that's important to them, write it down on the other side of the prediction, and seal it in the envelope. You of course have accessed the information somehow before sealing it away. Finally, you reveal this name by running through the alphabet, apparently reading which of the letters jump out at the person most in that moment. As with so many approaches to psychological forces, if it doesn't hit, you have the opportunity to deliver an interesting reading based on the letter choice and then proceed by having the person think of a word that starts with that letter, revealing it in whatever way you see fit. The letter-selection procedure thus has significance and logically introduces a real effect. Most of the time, however, you have the opportunity to supplement an already-amazing demonstration with an additional prediction with a logical presence as an introductory reveal. -109-

Nonverbal Behavior: Lie Detection The ability to tell when somebody is lying may be such an intriguing premise because lying is so pervasive. People tell an average of one lie per 5 social interactions (Kashy & DePaulo, 1996). People who lie more frequently tend to be more manipulative, more concerned with how they present themselves, and more extraverted and sociable (Kashy & DePaulo, 1996). Creative personalities have also been linked to a higher likelihood of dishonesty and deception (Gino & Ariely, 2012). The lies that people tell most often tend to be about their feelings, their preferences, and their opinions. Can People Detect Lies Reliably? As it turns out, people are terrible at detecting lies when they happen. Although it is a common ploy in mentalism to be able to tell when people are lying, in the real world, lie detection is incredibly difficult, and when people are asked to guess when someone is lying versus telling the truth, accuracy rates are barely above chance. Of course, this is great news if you have a technique to appear as though you are accurately detecting lies. The potential problem, however, is that a simple lie detection effect may not seem quite as impossible as it is. People may think that there's a 50% chance of getting it right or that they would be equally able to detect lies themselves. Therefore, consider framing a lie detection demonstration in the context of some data that show just how impossible it can be to detect a lie. Bond and DePaulo (2006) conducted a meta-analysis of 206 studies that examined how accurately people could detect dishonesty and found that the average accuracy rate of detecting lies was just 54%. When they considered only studies in which participants had to detect lies strictly using nonverbal behavior cues (i.e., silent -110-

videos), accuracy dropped to a mere 51%. Another meta-analysis by Aamodt and Custer (2006) echo and extend the previous findings. Although the accuracy rate for students participating in experimental st udies is only 54.2%, the accuracy rates for judges, police officers, customs officers, federal officers, and detectives are barely any different. Surprisingly, one study observing such accuracy among parole officers found an average accuracy rate of 40.4%, which means they were wrong more often than they were right. Contrary to popular belief, however, men and women showed no reliable differences in the ability to detect deception, and this ability also did not differ as a function of age, years of experience, education, or cognitive ability. Finally, the confidence a person has in his or her ability to detect dishonesty is not at all predictive of that ability. 14 That is, whether a person is sure or unsure of his ability to catch someone in a lie, he has about a 50% chance of being right either way. Some studies also suggest that an individual's ability to detect lies (low though that accuracy might be overall) generalize across types of lies. That is, someone's ability to detect lies about the opinions people express transfers to the ability to detect lies about information given in a mock trial (Frank & Eckman, 1997). These data also suggest that individuals who are relatively good at detecting lies rely on the ability to detect micro facial expressions, which is a skill that is not specific to any particular type of lie but would generalize across any dishonest communications. Who Can Detect Lies? So who can detect a lie? Interestingly, criminals show higher degrees of accuracy in detecting lies than even professional lie detectors. Aamodt and Custer (2006) identified a study showing that criminals' accuracy rates for lie detection was 65.4%. This may be because this population has a better sense of what actually gives a lie away. For 14 Technically, the correlation is statistically significant, but it is so small that we can effectively say there is no relationship. If you wanted to be totally accurate, you "."outd. s~ y that there's only the slightest, barely noticeable trend for people more confident in their he detection ability to show greater accuracy in these guesses. -111-

instance, there is a common belief that lying provokes a nervous reaction that results in touching one's face, shifting one's physical position, and gesturing, but in fact, these are not actually reliable "tells" (e.g., DePaulo, 1988). Indeed, in a study testing how prevalent these beliefs are, both college students and "professional lie detectors" (e.g., police detectives, customs officers, and prison guards) said that they thought these behaviors were indicative of lying, but when a sample of prisoners took the very same survey, they correctly indicated that these behaviors were not related to lying (Vrij & Semin, 1996). A Word About Research Methods These data paint a grim picture if a mentalist hopes to ever actually learn to detect deception through nonverbal behavior, but the evidence, if incorporated into a performance could really sell the achievement of successful lie detection demonstrations (even when your methods are a little more foolproof). Of course, several approaches that have been proposed in the mentalism community for successful lie detection genuinely rely on reading nonverbal cues (e.g., Patrick Redford's Prevaricator). And all hope is not lost. Even though people on average are bad at making their own judgments of deception, there are reliable cues that accompany dishonest (vs. honest) communication. Of course, the extent to which you can use these cues to actually construct a demonstration of lie detection has yet to be seen. I present them only as a report of the available evidence and not as a tried and true method for such an effect. One thing to bear in mind is that these studies tend to examine lying by comparing the behavior of people who had been instructed to tell a lie to the behavior of others who had been instructed to tell the truth. Also, the content of the lies may differ from the presentational premises often used by mentalists. That is, while many "lie detection" mentalism ploys are based on the participant lying about a simple "yes" or "no" response, the lies that people are instructed to tell in these studies are often less simplistic. -112-

For example, the studies included in DePaulo et al:s (2003) metaanalysis had people lie about a range of topics, including descriptions of facts or opinions, descriptions of films or images, descriptions of people, simulated job interviews, descriptions of personal experiences, and responses to personality questions. Clearly, the range of things about which people can be dishonest is vast! So although the following are reliable indicators of lying, they come from a particular set of scenarios. Nonverbal Tells First, when engaged in a communication, liars include fewer details in that communication than do truth tellers. It's not necessarily the case that liars spend less time talking (although they might under some circumstances), but the content of the communication is lacking in detail, compared to truth-tellers. Compared to truthful accounts, those of liars tend to make less logical sense; they are judged to be less plausible, less likely to be structured logically, and more likely to be internally inconsistent. Overall, people telling the truth are more likely to make corrections to their stories as they move forward, and people telling the truth are also much more likely than liars to acknowledge an inability to remember something. Liars' speech tends to also be less engaging, showing less involvement in their vocal presentations and using much fewer hand gestures to illustrate the points. Although other research had claimed that lying tends to be accompanied by greater speech disturbances, the meta-analysis didn't find any evidence that such disturbances (e.g., filled pauses and silent pauses) were predictive of lying. It is the case, however, that lying tends to be accompanied by more repetition of words and phrases. Not surprisingly, people who are lying are more nervous and tense, and this tension is manifested in vocal tension, speaking with a higher pitch, and pupil dilation. Interestingly~ tho~gh'. it seems t~at these physiological arousal cues tend to be reliable indicators of l~mg only when the liar is motivated to succeed in his or her deception. That is, if there is a particular incentive to get away with the lie, the liar -113-

will experience this increased tension, but without such motivation, these cues no longer predict lying.15 One cue that people may already be aware of is that of response time. Research has shown that when people are instructed to respond to questions with false (vs. true) information, they take longer to start responding to the question (e.g., Walczyk, Roper, Seemann, & Humphrey, 2003). In their meta-analysis, however, DePaulo et al. (2003) compared instances in which the participants had time to plan what they would say to instances in which they could not plan how they would respond. Not surprisingly, without the opportunity to plan one's message, lying is related to taking longer to respond to the question. However, when people do have the opportunity to plan what they will say, they begin speaking relatively more quickly when they lie than when they tell the truth. Linguistic Tells There has also been some work done that looks at the words people use when telling lies (vs. when providing honest accounts). This work comes from research related to "linguistic styles:' which are covered elsewhere in this book (page 81). In an illustrative set of studies, Newman, Pennebaker, Berry, and Richards (2003) compared the words people used when giving honest reports of their prior behavior or their attitudes toward an issue to the words they used when giving dishonest reports. They did this using computer software that extracts particular sets of words that represent different types of thinking. Using these linguistic variables as predictors, the resulting mathematical model was able to correctly identify liars 67% of the time whereas human judges making guesses based on the very same reports could identify liars only 52% of the time. A few of these linguistic indicators of lying stand out; the first is the use of first-person pronouns (e.g., "l;"'me:'"my"). 15 An interesting presentational ploy would be to incentivize compelling performances. Offer up a prize if the audience can trick you into hinking they're lying when they're not or that they're telling the truth when they're lyi'1g. -114-

For example, if you ask me what happened at the scene of a crime, I could say, "I saw a man run down the alley" (using a personal pronoun) or I could say, "A man ran down the alley" (not using a personal pronoun). Liars used these pronouns significantly less frequently, which is thought to signify distancing oneself from the lies being told. By contrast, referring to oneself may indicate that the person is being honest with him or herself. Liars also used more negative emotion words (e.g., "hate" or "anger") than truth-tellers. This is consistent with other research suggesting that the negative feelings of guilt or anxiety associated with lying can transfer to general expressed negativity. For example, Knapp and colleagues (1974) reported that people were more likely to make disparaging comments about others during a communication procedure when they were lying vs. telling the truth. Finally, the participants in these studies also used fewer exclusive words (e.g., "but" or "except") and more motion verbs (e.g., "move" or "go") when they were lying (vs. telling the truth). Both of these are likely due to the complex nature of lying. Keeping everything straight and inventing new details can take a lot of thought; therefore, words that further complicate this thought process (like exclusive words) are avoided and default verbs become relatively simplistic ones (like motion verbs at the expense of more complex, thoughtful verbs like "think" or "believe"). Neuroscience and Deception Although less informative for application, it is interesting to note that "lie detection" has been of interest to neuroscientists for many years. Neuroimaging technology remains crude, but that has not stopped companies from claiming that they can detect lies using the power of brain imaging (for a fee, of course). This has captured the imaginations of those in the legal field who see this as a bright opportunity for using technology to bypass the liar's attempts to conceal his or h.er deception and look straight into the source of thought: ~he ~ram. While this sounds amazing, we're many years away from this being a viable tool. -115-

There has, however, been research showing that on average, lying (vs. telling the truth) reliably activates a series of brain regions. For those with a mind for the details, these regions include the right anterior insula, the right inferior orbitofrontal cortex, the right inferior frontal lobe, the right middle frontal lobe, and the left middle temporal lobe, regions of the brain that are often associated with overcoming automatic responses and exerting behavioral control (Kozel, Johnson, Mu, Grenesko, La ken, & George, 2005). When and Why We Lie Finally, I wanted to briefly describe some related work that has shown when and why people tell lies. In particular, some research has suggested that it takes self-control to avoid dishonesty. That is, the automatic selfish response in some social situations would be to lie, and it takes active self-control to tell the truth. In a series of experiments, Mead, Baumeister, Schweitzer, and Ariely (2009) showed that making people feel mental fatigue reduces their capacity for self-control, which leads to a greater likelihood of acting dishonestly. Specifically, in one study, people we induced to feel mental fatigue by being asked to write an essay without using words containing the letters A and N, which is a mentally taxing activity. Try it! They were then given the opportunity to lie about their performance on a math test that would result in receiving an undeserved reward. As expected, the people who had initially gone through the mentally taxing experience were more likely to take the opportunity to lie for a reward than the people who had not gone through the earlier experience. This means that mentally exhausting experiences reduce our ability to override the urge to use dishonesty for our own gain. Surely there is plenty more that could be said about lie detection and the phenomenon of deception, but I hope that this information arms you with some ideas as to how to present a successful lie detection demonstration and maybe helps you adapt the research findings to a particular presentational premise that boosts your chance of accurately detecting your audience's lies. -116-

The "Pratfall" Technique It's common practice to intentionally "miss" in a mentalism demonstration. The disappointment in that mentalist's face when the participant has to say, "no that was not the card I was thinking of;' delivered with as much presentational confidence as possible. Usually, such intentional blunders are meant to make one's abilities appear more "real." Surely if someone really had the power to read thoughts, the results wouldn't be perfect every time. There may, however, be another reason to fail in a demonstration-and to fail hard. Elliot Aronson and his colleagues first showed evidence that when competent people find themselves in an embarrassing blunder, people like them more (Aronson, Willerman, & Floyd, 1966). In their study, participants watched a video of someone auditioning for a competitive trivia team. The person in the video was either someone who was clearly competent or clearly incompetent. At the end of the audition, though, in the critical "pratfall" conditions, the person clumsily spills his cup of coffee on himself. For the relatively incompetent person, the embarrassing pratfall made the participants like that person a little less, but when the person in the video seemed relatively competent, the same embarrassing pratfall actually increased liking for the person. There are a few caveats to this general finding, however. The advantage of the pratfall is more likely under particular circumstances. First, some evidence suggests that a pratfall increases liking for a competent person primarily when a male is judging another male (Deaux, 1972). Second, pratfalls increase liking for a competent person more when the perceiver has average self-esteem. It would seem that pratfalls increase liking for competent people because they humanize a person that may initially come across as extraordinary; therefore, people with average self-esteem are more likely to appreciate this humanization. People who already have either relatively low or relatively high selfesteem, however, actually liked the competent person more when he didn't make a mistake (Helmreich, Aronson, & LeFan, 1970). T he reason for this change in liking may differ for the people with low -117-

self-esteem vs. the people with high self-esteem. Those who are high in self-esteem already may come to respect the competent person as someone of similarly high accomplishment; any mistake, then, may cause a rejection of someone who they once thought was on equal footing with them. Those who are low in self-esteem, however, may come to admire a person who they see as clearly superior and as such, they may not be able to tolerate any apparent flaws. For the mentalist, being too perfect can certainly backfire-not only because it casts doubt on the authenticity of the claims made but also because it may prevent the audience from liking the performer as much as they could. The results of the studies I've just reviewed, however, point to several important considerations when choosing to commit a mind reading blunder, including the gender of your audience and their collective self-esteem. The biggest point across all of these studies, however, is that it's only competent people who experience a boost in liking from committing a pratfall. In all of these studies, when a person seems incompetent, he is disliked regardless of whether or not he makes a mistake. Therefore, it is important that you demonstrate credibility as a competent mentalist before you commit a true uh-oh. If you miss your prediction by too much too early in your show, you may have set your audience up to dislike you for the remainder. It's only after you've proven your worth that a slip-up will gain you points. If you wantto include a mistake in your act, however, I would caution you not to make it a mistake that you've planned to bounce back from. That is, a prediction that at first appears incorrect but becomes correct after turning it upside down is not a pratfall. You want to re-establish your competence after a pratfall, of course, but I would suggest doing so via a new demonstration or by giving the same feat another try. One-Ahead Scribble Subtlety In performing Josh Zandman's "Impromptu Book Test;' I developed a subtlety that depends in part on the power of a "pratfall:' The same logic can be applied to other instances of one-ahead based methods, but as you'll see you're restricted somewhat because ultimately you -118-

only "hit" on one of two instances of mind reading. R~ther t.han reveal the nuances of Josh's clever thinking as it applies to his particular book test, I provide you here with a corollary effect that operates on similar principles, but the point is really to demonstrate the pratfall subtlety. Scribbledeedoo (Effect) Effect: The performer asks a participant to consider all the cards in a deck and to think of just one of them. Although he tries to pick up on exactly what the card is, he ultimately gets it wrong. When he tries again, however, he gets it just right. In fact, upon later reflection, he wasn't even that far off the first time. Explanation: This is just a dressed-up one-ahead method. Begin by asking someone to think of any card in a deck and repeat the name of that card mentally, over and over again. The idea here is that they're getting used to the sound of the card's name rather than visualizing it. This is important only in that it justifies part 2 of the effect. The participant truly has the freedom to think of any card at all, and at this point, you just make a guess, and make it a genuine guess. If you've been tooling around with various"real"mind reading methods, you may be pretty good at this. Let's say you guess "Jack of Diamonds:' Write that guess down on an index card, just above the center (see image panel a). Now that you've committed yourself to your guess, ask the participant to say the card she has been thinking of. 16 Almost assuredly, you will be wrong. If you happened to be right, or even close to being right, you have a miracle on your hands. Clean, propless mentalism. Just turn the card around and quit while you're ahead. But in the statistically likely event that your guess is reasonably far away from correct, proceed as planned. Let's say she says that she's been thinking of the "6 of Spades:' It's at this moment that you can apply the pratfall technique. A look 16 " ... because I want everyone to be as amazed as you will be." Don't forget the "because" technique! -119-

of embarrassment overcomes you, and you let out an "okay ... " as you scratch out the guess you had just written down. This always gets a laugh. a. b. c. At some level, nobody expected you to get this right anyway, and it's a humanizing moment to own up to what has to be a pretty big failure, based on your nonverbal reaction. In fact, however, although you are genuinely crossing something out on the index card, you're crossing out blank space. What you're really doing is scribbling a line in the space above the guess you had written (see image panel b). Why would you scratch out blank space? Because people can't easily tell the order in which things are written on a piece of paper- we tend not to notice layers of ink and only notice patterns of ink. In a moment, you'll write something on top of this scribble line, and later it will look as though it was written first. "Okay, "you say." Let's try that again. I may have given both of us a little too much freedom to let our minds wander. Playing cards are combinations of numbers, colors, and symbols, so it can be a little slippery to make too much meaning of them when we're just thinking about them. Let's make it a little more concrete."You take out an actual deck of cards, give them a quick mix, and spread them for the participant to see their faces. "These cards are very visual, as you can see by how they appear so distinct from one another. Just take one of the cards at random and really pay attention to how the card looks:' At this point, you control the Jack of Diamonds (or whatever card you actually guessed earlier) to a -1 20-

position for forcing, and force that card on the participant. You can do this however you like. I really don't care how you do it. You again go through the rigmarole of reading the person's thoughts, picking up this time on the visuals (which again is all just an excuse to change up the format of the card selection). Now when you write your guess, you will write something over the scribble you have drawn on the card. But what do you write? Well, don't write what the person actually thought of. It's a little cheap to make a big deal about missing, garnering empathy, and then show off that you actually had it right all along. As far as routining, it also makes little sense to move onto a less impressive demonstration when you actually got the more challenging one wrong. Instead, write a card that's somewhat close to what the person first thought of-something that's wrong enough that you can defend why you felt discouraged by it but that's close enough that people who care to notice would be reasonably impressed. In this case, the person had actually thought of the "6 of Spades;' so I might write "4 of Spades" on top of the scribble (see image panel c). Now ask the participant what card she's thinking of, and ask her to show everyone else the card itself. You can now turn around the card to show that you got it exactly right-"Jack of Diamonds:' For all practical purposes, that's the end of the effect; however, if you have a sharp audience, they will notice that you weren't that far off the first time. Notes: My only true contribution to this is the scribble technique. The rest is easily composed from very basic knowledge of mentalism. I do think, however, that the scribble technique adds a few important dimensions. First, as mentioned, it utilizes the "pratfall" effect. You create a humanizing moment where you really do have to pick up and move on, but importantly, it's not at the expense of a climax. Second, it provides a visual cue that prevents someone from leaping to a one-ahead conclusion even if it's just a lay notion of one-ahead. The illusion is strong enough that it really looks like everything -121 -

happened in the order you presented it. Finally, the scribble provides a visual guide that orients people's attention to the final revelation. Without the scribble, it is somewhat disorienting to look at a paper with two things written on it and know where to pay attention. The "cross-out" does a good job of drawing attention the revelation that's meaningful in the moment. When you make the scribble, though, don't scratch out the space too much. People should be able to easily read what will be written on top of it. I opt for a gentle wavy line because it (a) allows room to see "through" it, (b) looks more like scratching something out, and (c) obscures exactly where on the page you're drawing the line. It's possible that people could catch on to subtle differences in where you're writing each guess, which is why I keep them relatively close together, and the up-and-down motion of the "crossing out" step makes it less clear where I'm crossing something out. -122-

Making Predictions Failing to Know Our Future Selves In .general, people a.re .no good at the predicting the future. It's a good thing, too, or prediction effects wouldn't be at all interesting. But ~hat's especially intriguing about the difficulty of knowing the future 1s that people can also fail to accurately predict something that they really think they can predict: their future feelings. For instance, think about how you would feel if you lost your job next month. According to research on affective forecasting, whatever intensity of emotion you are predicting now has little to do with how you will actually feel if that happened. Time and again, studies have shown that "people routinely mispredict how much pleasure or displeasure future events will bring" (Wilson & Gilbert, 2005, p. 131 ). These affective forecasting failures often take the form of overestimating how happy or unhappy you will be (and for how long) in response to a future event. This so-called "impact bias" (Wilson & Gilbert, 2003) can take many forms. For instance, if you imagined how you would feel if you lost your job next month, the emotion you predicted is likely more intense than what you would actually feel. In an empirical demonstration of this, researchers asked college students to report how happy they thought they would be if they were assigned to a particular dorm on campus. Even though students said that they would be really happy in some dorms and really unhappy in others, their actual happiness one year later did not depend on which of those dorms they had been randomly assigned to. Students who were living in dorms that they thought would make them happy were no happier than students who were living in dorms that they thought would make them unhappy (Dunn, Wilson, & Gilbert, 2003). Why do people fail so badly in predicting their future feelings? The research has uncovered several explanations. One is called focalism and refers to the idea that we focus too much on one particular -123-

aspect of a situation when we predict how it will make us feel (Wilson, Wheatley, Meyers, Gilbert, & Axson, 2000). As an example, if I'm trying to predict how I would feel if I won a magic contest, I'd over-focus on the positives that would come from it, but I wouldn't be as apt to consider other things in my life that could limit the elation (e.g., workplace stress, an upcoming trip, etc.). Another reason for the misprediction of future feelings is called immune neglect. The notion is that just like our bodies have immune systems that defend against illness, we also have a "psychological immune system" that defends against threats to our happiness. In other words, we adapt to events in our lives, but we often forget how quickly we adapt (Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Bum berg, & Wheatley, 1998), overlooking the power of our psychological immune systems. In the example of loosing one's job, we know that people bounce back from those setbacks. Similarly, if you're thinking about how you would feel following a break up with a romantic partner, you might overestimate how bad you will feel because you don't realize how readily you'll be able to work through the setback. With time, you would develop an explanation for the break-up, change your attitudes toward the other person, and so forth. Those things, however, are hard to account for when you are currently in the relationship. All of this is to illustrate the difficulty of predicting the future- even when it's something we think we'd be able to predict. Many mentalists, of course, are in the business of prediction. It is thus compelling to know just how difficult knowing the future is. We may think that anyone could predict at least their own emotional future, but even this proves challenging. Statistical vs. Intuitive Predictions Although it's difficult for people to predict the future, mathematical models can do a surprisingly good job. In fact, some research has attempted to determine just how our own intuitions stack up against statistical models in making predictions. Linear regression models-a particular kind of statistical model- has a particular advantage over human judgments when it comes to predicting fut ure numerical -1 24-

outcomes like a student's GPA. However, statistical models have also demonstrated an advantage over subjective predictions for outcomes like anxiety, job performance, and personality (see Grove, Zald, Lebow, Snitz, & Nelson, 2000). This scholarly pursuit owes a great debt to a seminal book by Paul Meehl in 1954 on the comparison of"clinical"vs. "statistical"prediction. By "clinical predictions;' he meant judgments made by compiling data using informal, subjective methods. By contrast, "statistical" (or "mechanical" or "actuarial") predictions are based on formal data compilation, producing fully replicable, objective analyses. Imagine, for example, that you wished to predict how long someone (why don't we call him "Rupert"?) will last at his new job. A clinical approach would involve mentally reviewing what seems to be relevant information: previous job success, personality variables, academic accomplishment, etc. The judge would then mentally juggle these variables and come to a reasoned conclusion about how long Rupert will last. A statistical approach, however, would instead quantify the relevant variables and include them in a mathematical equation derived from previous data assessing the relationships between those variables and the outcome of interest. The resulting computation is the final prediction. Nearly fifty years after Meehl's (1954) work, a comprehensive meta-analysis, testing the reliability of the patterns first presented by Meehl, offers clear evidence that statistical predictions afford greater accuracy than clinical predictions. Across 136 studies, statistical prediction models outperformed subjective predictions by about 10% on average. This advantage was true for many kinds of predictions, ranging from mental illness diagnoses to criminal recidivism. In addition, the superiority of statistical models remained true "regardless of the judgment task, type of judges, judges' amounts of experience, or the types of data being combined" (Grove et al., 2000, p. 19). Why is there such an advantage over subjective predictions? One compelling reason, suggested by Dawes, Faust, and Meehl (1989), is that statistical models are built to include only variables that matter in making accurate predictions. These variables are weighted in the -125-

equations depending on how importantthey actually are in predicting the outcome of interest. Individual people, however, are not as good at understanding which variables are actually important and often convince themselves that certain variables matter when they do not. Going back to the earlier example, it might seem to us like Rupert's degree of extraversion would predict his job success, but it might not actually matter all that much. So when we place emphasis on this variable, we wrongly predict the outcome. The statistical model, though, treats that variable more appropriately. Individuals also lack access to representative samples to build their own mental models of how to predict someone's future. A mathematical model can be built from hundreds of people's data whereas an individual couldn't possibly have access to that many unique cases to establish reliable patterns. Learning from Our Inability to Predict the Future So what's my point in telling a bunch people who claim to predict the future that math can do it better? That's a great question, and I wish I could just say, "Because it's interesting!" That answer, though, does little to appease people who spent money to learn about mentalism. One way to make use of this information is to set up the impossibility of predicting the future at all. You can share this very real truth with an audience as a means to illustrate how amazing it is that you will be able to predict anything with such specificity (as I have mentioned in the section on affective forecasting). In addition, though, you might use this as the subscript for your prediction demonstrations. Mentalists have advocated for showing the "process" of mind reading, and one way to do this is to imagine something very particular during your performance to craft an even more believable presentation. Thus, when writing a prediction, you might mentally simulate filling in a mathematical equation, plugging in the relevant variables and solving for y. But those are just a few thoughts. At the very least, it's good for people who"make predictions" to know what it really means to make predictions. -126-

Priming In a search for a fundamental tool in social psychology, the notion of "priming" and "accessibility" is sure to leap to the top of the list. Much of how we understand the human mind comes back to the notion of a schema, or a network of associations in the mind that links various thoughts, beliefs, and evaluations together. To take an exam pie, consider how the concept of"coffee"is represented in your mind. In my mind, it's linked with lots of coffee-related beliefs like where it comes from, how it's made, what temperature it should be. It's also linked with evaluative content-its pleasant smell, its utility in keeping me awake, and its good taste ... an overall positive evaluation. However, "coffee" is also related in my mind to other concepts, each of which are linked with their own sets of beliefs and evaluations. For instance, the topic of "coffee" might be linked with various brand names and coffee shops. It might also be linked with similar beverages like tea or hot cocoa, and "hot cocoa" is linked to its own set of associations. As you can imagine, this network goes on and on, linking all of my mental content. Of interest to psychologists is what makes some of those thoughts (or "nodes" in the mental network) more active than others. For a set of thoughts to be active is to be at the front of one's mind. It's "ready" to get used, so to speak. At any given moment, however, most thoughts are not especially active-they're stored in your mind somewhere, but you haven't been reminded of them, so they lay dormant. As an example, for someone like me, the concept of "coffee" isn't active in my mind all of the time. It can become active, however, when I see someone drinking it, when I feel myself getting tired, when I walk by a coffee shop, and when I smell coffee being roasted. These events re-activate the concept of"coffee:' For someone who works in the coffee industry, however, the concept of coffee and all those thoughts, beliefs, and evaluations that it's related to are active all the time. This is what we refer to as "chronic accessibility:' There are certain topics that are just very often at the forefront of our minds. Readers of this book are likely to have -127-

"mentalism" as a chronically accessible topic. When you encounter some new product at Staples, your first thought might be, "that would be a great method for an effect" even if you hadn't necessarily been consciously thinking about mentalism at the moment. People with only a passing interest in mental ism are unlikely to have "mentalism" chronically accessible and thus their first thought upon encountering the same new product wouldn't be its application to mindreading methodology. As the previous example illustrates, when mental content like the concept of "mindreading" is active or more accessible in your mind, it's not just that you think about it more. Rather, the mental content that's most accessible at any given moment affects many important processes and in particular, it provides a way to interpret ambiguous information (see "The Power of Ambiguity" on page 17 4). To take an example from social psychology, I'll turn to a domain that I don't address much in this book but that represents a large portion of research- stereotyping and prejudice. Stereotypes are networks of associations just like anything else in a person's mind, which means they can be more or less active at any given moment. For example, someone's stereotype of "teenagers" might include associations with technology, rude behavior, youth, health, little responsibility, etc. So imagine you see a teenage girl talking on her phone. She crosses the street, giving no attention to the fact that there are cars on the road. How do you interpret her behavior? Let's say you hold two sets of stereotype beliefs. On the one hand, as I've just mentioned, you may believe that all teenagers are inconsiderate and think they're entitled to do as they please. On the other hand, you believe that all women are easily distracted and never pay attention to their surroundings. Each of these stereotypes could help you interpret the teenage girl's behavior, but your ultimate interpretation depends on what concept is more active at the time. If the concept of "teenagers" is more active (maybe because this event happened near a high school, which reminds you of your "teenage" stereotype), then you will think her behavior is a sign of disrespect and arrogance. If the concept of "gender" is more active (maybe you just listened to a comedy routine about the differences between men -1 28-

and women, which reminds you of your "women" stereotype), then you will think her behavior is a sign of not paying attention to her surroundings. In this discussion, I've already mentioned a few ways a concept can become active (e.g., walking by a coffee shop makes "coffee" more accessible and driving by a school makes"teenagers"more accessible). In general, social psychologists refer to this process as priming.17 When a concept is "primed," it is made more active and accessible in one's mind. Importantly, this isn't necessarily a conscious process. It's not as if priming the concept of "fear" makes someone say, "Gee, I'm thinking so much about fear right now!" Instead, it's a subtle way of bringing that concept into a mental space that makes it influential for subsequent judgments, decisions, and so forth. Priming can work in two general ways: subliminally and supraliminally. A subliminal prime is one that's presented below conscious awareness. For example, by very quickly flashing a series of fear-related words on a screen, one can make that concept more accessible in a person's mind even though the person wasn't ever aware that the words had been presented. For a special discussion of subliminal priming, see the section in this book about subliminal influence (page 155). Supraliminal priming, by contrast, is when the stimuli used as primes occur with the person's awareness. This doesn't mean that the person is aware of the intent to prime the concept- just that he or she consciously perceived the stimulus. For instance, if I wanted to prime the concept of"beauty;' I could give you a word search puzzle in which many of the words are related to this concept (e.g., "pretty;' "attractive,""brilliant;' etc.). In this case, you're aware of each word but not of the intent to prime a certain set of thoughts. 17 If for some reason you have been following current events in the world of psychology, you'll know that the notion of"priming"has come under fire recently. A prominent psychologist wrote an influential "open letter" expressing deep skepticism of the very concept itself, and in a scientific climate that puts a premium of being able to replicate one's experiments exactly, some specific (and classic) priming studies have been called into question. Although it would be closed-minded of me to just cast this criticism aside, I have to admit that I have trouble understanding the basis of these skeptics' doubts. If there's anything that's been shown over and over again in the field of social psychology, it's the influence of pri.ming mental c.ontent. Study after study employs priming as a tool and has documented reliable effects. I ~nclude this footnote, however, in case you caught wind of this controversy and are ready to discount this whole notion of priming. -129-

This is all very abstract, of course, so let's see how these things actually play out in a couple famous experiments. Higgins, Rholes, & Jones (1977) conducted the first study of priming, and the simplicity illustrates its influence well. They had participants first do a simple perception task that required them to remember a series of words. Most of the words in the task were ordinary, neutral words. The sneaky part, however was that the set of words for some participants contained a few positive personality traits (e.g., "adventurous" and "self-confident"). The other participants' word set instead included negative personality traits (e.g., "reckless" and "stubborn"). Other than this subset of words, everyone had to remember exactly the same words. So although participants weren't aware of it necessarily, some had been primed to think more about positive personality traits and some had been primed to think more about specific negative traits. Next, participants were told that they would participate in a "reading comprehension task" in which they read a brief description of a man named Donald. Critically, this description was ambiguous as to what Donald was like as a person. Following this ambiguous description, though, participants were asked to rate how much they liked Donald. What was this all about? This seems like a random assortment of activities for participants to do. In fact, the researchers expected the word memorizing task to prime different personality traits which would help people interpret the description of Donald, thereby biasing what they thought of him. That's precisely what they found. The people who had been primed with positive personality traits like "adventurous" later said they liked Donald more than the people who had been primed with negative personality traits like "reckless;' even though they all read exactly the same description. To get a better sense of how this could happen, here's an abbreviated version of the description participants read: Donald has climbed Mt. McKinley, shot the Colorado rapids in a kayak, driven in a demolition derby, and piloted a jet-powered boat - without knowing very much about boats. He has risked injury and even death a number of times. He has been thinking that perhaps he would do some skydiving or maybe cross the Atlantic in a sailboat. -130-

You can see how that description might mean something very different if you're reading it with the lens of "adventurous:' compared to reading it with the lens of "reckless:'You may thus interpret the very same words to make a judgment of a person differently, depending on what is already more accessible to you. Another example is one that I have adapted to a classroom demonstration of priming, and it surprises me every time how powerfully it operates. There exists a large area of research on the psychology of aggression, and one interesting finding is what's called the "weapons effect:' Very simply, research has shown that merely seeing weapons primes aggression, which can translate into more aggressive behavior. In some studies, researchers show some people pictures of weapons, and they show other people pictures of ordinary objects. Afterward, the people who saw weapons are quicker to identify aggressive words like "attack" and "hurt" than non-aggressive words like "lonely" or "inferior" (Anderson, Benjamin, & Bartholow, 1998). In my classes, I demonstrate this by showing half the room a series of weapons images on the projector and showing the other half of the room a series of everyday objects. Then I have them complete the same set of "word fragments" with the first word that comes to mind. These fragments could be completed with an aggressive or a non-aggressive word. For example, the fragment "K I __ " could be completed with "kill" or "kiss:' Similarly, the fragment "C _ T" could be completed with "cut" or "cat." By the magic of priming, the people saw a bunch of weapons complete more of these fragments with aggressive words than the people who saw the everyday objects. Okay, so I've taken a lot of time to describe the phenomenon of priming (and believe me, I could go on- there's a lot of research and theory trying to understand the nature of priming, its effects of judgments and decisions, and the conditions under which it's most effective; Higgins, 1996) ... but what does it mean for you? There are a few applications, and they circle around methods for psychological forces. You may have noticed that these priming studies resemble the faux explanations given in the "psychological illusion" presentation -131 -

style. That is, pointing out the elements in the environment that subconsciously nudge someone to think of a particular word may have some degree of psychological truth to it. In theory, something like priming could be used to nudge people in a particular direction, but it's to the extent that the primes serve to activate certain mental content. It's nor the case that mentioning words like "circus" and "peanuts" will automatically make people think of "elephant" when you ask them to think of an animal, but it would make the schema of "circus" more accessible and nudge people in the direction of thinking of things in more circus-like ways rather than think of "circus" out of the blue. Priming Presentation For a great application of this kind of thinking, check out this blog post on Nick Kolenda's blog in which he applies these concepts to improving success in a classic psychological force: http://www. careerinmentalism.com/psychological-forces/. He does a great job outlining the social psychological theory and exploring the ways in which it can be applied to these forces. One of the great points he makes is that the linguistic trickery that mentalists often use as the subtext of their "subconscious influence" is unlikely to actually prime anything. For example, in my faux psychological influence explanation for the circle-triangle force, I use the phrase "images or clues" which I can then emphasize as being pronounced "images-CIRCLE-oos:' In truth, this verbal trickery is unlikely to activate the mental concept of "circles" because it's meaninglessly embedded in other words that the person is likely to actually process as "images" and "clues:' So your psychological forces would do well with embedding the right ideas in the pre-script. Assimilation vs. Contrast There's one extra detail to go into at this point, though, and that is the difference between primes that have assimilation effects vs. primes that have contrast effects. Sometimes priming someone to think of -132-

"adventurousness" might lead her to interpret information as evidence of adventurousness (assimilation), but other times, priming someone to think of "adventurousness" might instead lead her to interpret information by contrasting it against a standard of adventure (thus viewing it as less adventurous). It turns out that there's one key detail that determines which type of effect happens: awareness. In many priming studies, the priming is subtle; people are not aware that a particular set of thoughts is being activated. That is, the meaning of the primes is incidental. To take an example, in the Higgins, Rholes, & Jones (1977) study, people didn't realize that the words in the first memory activity had any special meaning-they were just words on a list, but just by reading them, the relevant mental stuff was activated. So what happens when people catch on? What if people were aware that the words in one activity had a special relevance to personality types rather than just experiencing them as words on a list? Martin (1986) tried to replicate the original "Donald" study with one key change: he made the priming task more blatant. Instead, he had participants read a set of phrases and explicitly indicate what personality type was exemplified in each one. Now the personality meaning of the primes is blatant- people knew that they were being guided to think more about certain personality traits. When they read the same description of"Donald" and rated how much they liked him, Martin's (1986) results were the opposite; people primed to think of the negative traits rated Donald as more likable than people primed to think of the positive traits. This is a "contrast effect" because people view the target in contrast to the prime. These effects have been shown time and again. For instance, when researchers separated people into two categories-those who remembered specific elements of the priming procedure and those who didn't-they found a strong assimilation effect for those who didn't remember the priming details (i.e., they were less aware of the primes' meaning) and a strong contrast effect for those who did remember the priming details (i.e., they were more aware of the primes' meaning; Lombardi, Higgins, & Bargh, 1987). -133-

Using Priming to Force So the lesson is that if you're trying to apply priming principles to psychological forces, you'll want to pay attention to how subtle the priming procedure is. If you say, "think about these six pictures of ducks" and then say, fill in these blanks to come up with the first word that strikes you:'_ U C K~' you might end up with an unsavory finale. That you were guiding people to think of ducks is too blatant, thus encouraging contrast. Finally, you may consider using the notion of priming in ways far more subtle than psychological forces. That is, sprinkling words like "incredible" or "amazing" into you scripts (without drawing too much attention to them, of course), you might guide people to activate their schemas for"amazing" and view your performance in line with it. Priming also extends beyond using specific words. Telling a story or asking someone to recall their own experiences can serve to covertly activate mental content. So if you can revive people's mental concept of"amazement" or"wonder:'you may also succeed in guiding them to interpret your performance in that light if they might not have done so spontaneously. Faux-Priming and a "Circleand-Triangle" Script Earlier I referenced a script I use to bolsterthe"psychological influence" explanation of the circle/triangle force. Here's the full script. I don't use this much anymore, but I offer it here if you happen to be interested. It's unlikely to actually facilitate the force, but we know that people are very likely to think of a circle and a triangle, given the correct instructions (see, among other resources, Banachek's Psychological Subtleties). At the beginning, I address the audience with this script: Anyone in business knows that there are a number of books and seminars, or classes, regarding influence. -134-

A knowledgeable salesman works around customer hestitation and analyzes the person in order to try and glean information that allows him to present his pitch from the really unique angle the person will respond to. After a moment, I ask everyone to try something with me. It's at this point that I ask them to think of two simple geometric shapes, following all the subtleties and nudges that can be found elsewhere in the mentalism literature. Once I've shown that I knew in advance that most people would think of a circle and a triangle, I proceed to explain how it worked. "It all goes back to something I said only a moment ago": Anyone in business knows that there are a number of books and seminar--C/RCLE--asses regarding influence. A knowledgeable salesamn works aROUND customer hestitation and analyzes the person to TRIANGLE-eon information that allows him to present his pitch from THREE-fly unique ANGLE the person will respond to. -135-

Rapport The concept of rapport offers a lot of potential to mentalists, readers, and magicians. An effect is deeper, with a more profound impact, when the performer fosters a close connection with the person who experiences it. The application of the following principles that foster closeness and mutual liking will be of particular interest to the psychic reader because he or she is more able to invest the time needed to successfully foster rapport. Successful readings depend on a sitter who is open to the reading and trusts the reader. Nevertheless, these are also worth studying for the performing mentalist and magician to help encourage rapport with the people whose minds are being read. Similarity When I teach this principle to college students, I like to contrast this with the common notion that "opposites attract:' In fact, people tend to prefer others who are similar to them. Democrats marry other democrats, extraverted people prefer other extraverted people, and so on. There are a few domains where this is especially true. First, there is evidence that people are more attracted to others who look similar to them (Berscheid, Dion, Waister, & Waister, 1971 ). Second, people tend to like others who are similar in personality (Botwin, Buss, & Shackelford, 1997). Finally, a robust effect in research on attitudes is what Byrne (1961 ) referred to as the "law of attraction" in which people tend to like others who hold similar opinions. That is, if you like movies, you will like and respect another person more if he or she also likes (vs. dislikes) movies. Any of these might be used to your advantage to foster mutual respect and liking in an interaction. An example of attitude similarity playing its role in deepening rapport happened to me many years ago. When I was in high school, I was interested in graphic design and 30 computer modeling. I was looking to buy my own computer, and I went to the on line customer service page of a computer dealer. -136-

During a chat session with one of the company's representatives, I mentioned that I was looking for a computer that would support my interest in graphic design. In response, the person said something like "Oh, I'm really interested in graphic design, too:' That was all it took. We seemed to agree on this simple topic, and I was instantly more trusting. Now, I don't propose that you lie about your interests to "trick" someone into liking you and forming a closer connection, but be on the lookout for things a person might say during an interaction or reading that resonates with your own interests. In these cases, be vocal about your similarity with the person, and be genuine. If it seems that you are merely making such a statement to make a good impression, the technique isn't likely to work (e.g., Friestad & Wright, 1994). With regard to the personality similarity effect, you may find it helpful to match the personality of the other person. If a sitter seems shy and introverted, come down to that level rather than conducting a reading with a great extraverted buoyancy. If someone appears to be very conscientious, approach the interaction with similar conscientiousness. In doing so, you foster liking and offer the person the chance to let down his or her guard in a comfortable environment. Mimicry This is likely to strike many readers as familiar because it's a concept that has found its way into the mentalism literature over the past several years. Luckily, this is one of those techniques with scientific merit. Sometimes known as "matching" or"mirroring;' many have said that mirroring another person's movements is one way to establish rapport. Indeed Chartrand and Bargh (1999) provided evidence for exactly this effect. In a study where pairs of people engaged in an interaction with each other, only one person in the pair was an actual participant; the other person was a confederate working as part of the study. During the interaction, the confederate either adopted the no~v~rbal behaviors ("posture, movement, and mannerisms ) of the part1c1pant -137-

or merely engaged in neutral body movements. After the interaction was over, the participants rated their experience. Compared to when a confederate in the interaction was making neutral movements, when the confederate mimicked the nonverbal behaviors of the conversation partner, the participants reported greater liking for the other person and were more likely to say that the conversation had gone smoothly. Similar results have been shown in subsequent studies, and researchers have demonstrated many types of behavioral mimicry, including facial expressions, emotion, and verbal patterns like accents and speech rate (for a review, see Chartrand & van Baaren, 2009). Thus, subtle mirroring of a person's nonverbal behaviors can be enough to increase liking and perceived quality of interaction. Reciprocal Liking People like people who like them. If that doesn't make sense, read it a couple more times, and it will clear up. For instance, if you know that /like you, you will like me more than if you thought I didn't like you. When people believe that another person likes them (accurately or otherwise), they in turn report greater liking for that person and go on to act in a more likable way, thus actually making the other person actually like them more (Curtis & Miller, 1986; Gold, Ryckman, & Mosley, 1984). As a performer-and a mentalist, especially- you should already like people. So don't be shy about showing it. When it is clear to a spectator or a sitter that you like him or her as a person, he or she will respond in kind, feeling greater liking and trust toward you. Fast Friends Technique When psychologists want to understand the dynamics of a close relationship in a controlled environment, how can they go about doing that? Studying the behavior patterns of actual friends can be difficult-you can't account for how long they've been friends, the influence of mutual friends, whether or not they have recently been in a fight, and so on. Instead, researchers have developed ways to take -138-

strangers (usually students at a university) and put them through a procedure that fosters a relatively close social bond. That way, they can look at differences between partners who have vs. have not gone through this activity to see what relational closeness can accomplish. One procedure to induce relational closeness in the lab was first developed by Arthur Aron and his colleagues (1997) and involved the concept of "mutual self-disclosure:' In particular, this selfdisclosure escalated from relatively mundane information about oneself to relatively more personal information. In so doing, partners were expected to develop a temporary feeling of closeness, feeling interconnected with one another. Indeed, engaging in this procedure with a stranger, compared with mere small talk, resulted in greater feelings ofliking forthe other person and better interaction outcomes. Although the original procedure took about 45 minutes to complete, Constantine Sedikides and colleagues developed a streamlined version that produced comparable results after only 9 minutes of interaction. In this task, two strangers came into the lab and were each given the same list of 29 questions, divided into the three groups. They were to go back and forth as naturally as they could, each answering as many questions as they could get through. They had one minute to discuss the first set, three minutes for the second set, and five minutes for the third set; each group of questions was characterized by different levels of intimacy. The first set included relatively simple questions like "What is your first name?'; "Where are you from?'; and "How old are you?" The second set increased the self-disclosure with questions like "What are your hobbies?'; "If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go and why?'; and "What is one thing happening in your life that makes you stressed out?" Finally, the last list increases intimacy even more with questions like "If you could have one wish granted, what would that be?'; "What is your happiest early chil~hood memory?'; and "Describe the last time you felt lonely:' For copyright reasons, I can't share the full list of questions exactly, but the paper by Sedikides et al. (1999) is available as a PDF on line as of this writing. Of course, it's unlikely that you will employ a full 9-minute laboratory -139-

induction before you begin performing or giving a reading. Also, a glance at some of the questions used in the induction may strike you as strange for a mentalist be asking. Why would we ask someone what their hobbies are if we're able to read minds? I'm not sharing this research as a ready-to-go method for increasing closeness but rather to demonstrate the power of mutual self-disclosure. Oftentimes, the experience people have with a mentalist is very one-sided. We learn little about what's happening in the mentalist's mind but everything about what's going on in the other person's. This makes sense, of course, because that's where the entertainment comes from! And certainly in the context of a stage show, there is less time to develop a deep connection with every person who joins you onstage. In more intimate settings, however, this notion of mutual self-disclosure can help create a deeper, more powerful experience for the other person. In addition to having people provide information about themselves, volunteer to answer the very same questions yourself. Give them insight into yourself just as they have been volunteering information about themselves. Fast Friends Ploy Here's a little presentational ploy that takes inspiration from the fast friends procedure to add depth to an intimate display of mind reading. The procedure I will outline is designed for use with an impression pad that can give you a real-time peek, but it can easily be adapted to other peek methods. On the first page of the impression pad, you've written three simple questions: "What is your favorite color?': "Where did you grow up?': and "Given the choice of anyone in the world, who would you want as a dinner guest?"You say to the other person that it would be good for you to get to know each other. After all, it's easier to get inside someone's head a little easier if you have something to go on first. You go through each question, providing your answer first and then asking the other person provide his or her answer. Take this as an opportunity to genuinely get to know the person and share something of yourself. On the second page of the pad, you've written a list of five (or more) -140-

questions that are a little more personal. Examples could be "If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go and why?'; "For what in life do you feel most grateful?'; "What is one of your biggest fears" or "What is your most treasured memory?" (Of course, you should choose questions that you feel you have an adequate answer for). Because it would take too long to answer all of these, ask the other person to name a number from 1 to 5 and read out that question. As before, provide your answer and then ask the other person for his or hers. On the third page, you've written yet another set of questions. These questions should be ones whose answers could be su~cinctly v:ritten down (and subsequently glimpsed). Examples might be What country would you most like to travel to in the world?" or "What do you consider to be your'lucky number'?" Before showing the person this list, tell him or her that hopefully the conversation you had just been having, however brief, should have been enough to develop at least some connection between the two of you. As a result, you hope to be able to know the person's answer to the next question without him or her saying anything aloud. You again ask for a number between one and five and read out that question. However your impression device works, have the person think about the question and then write his or her answer on a piece of paper, fold it up and keep it. After this has been done, get your peek and provide your own answer. Although the questions are simple, offer some expansion on your answer to provide distance from the participant's writing down of the response. Finally, it's time for the reveal. "Having gotten to know each other a little more, I think I have some idea of what your ideal travel destination is ... " Proceed to reveal this information, now having genuinely established a connection with this person. As a bonus, this is also a good opportunity for a "spectator as the mind reader" type of effect. Through the course of the fast friends procedure, you have been getting to know one another; therefore, the other person should have similar insight into your mind as well. -1 41 -

When I do this, the last question on the third page is: "If you were to pick a number between 1 and 1 O that best characterizes you, what would it be and why?" Typically during the normal routine, the person does not choose the last question to read. If they do, it can lead straight into this if you choose or you can say, "Actually, I'm saving that one for something else we'll do in a minute. Pick another one:' After you finish revealing the spectator's answer in the original routine, say, "That's great. Actually, since we've really been getting to know each other with these questions, theoretically, you should be able to know what my answers would be at this point too. I saved an easy one if you want to try this-read out the last question on this list." They read the numbers question, and you write down what your answer would be, just as they had done before. First ask them to reveal what they would choose as their own number and then ask for them to guess what your number would be and why. I think it's important to ask them the why component of the question too because it can make the effect stronger than the person merely guessing a random number correctly. It strongly frames the answer as them knowing something about you rather than guessing a number. Of course, when they provide the number they think you would choose, you turn the paper around to show them exactly that. There are a couple ways to actually pull this off. One is simply a nailwriter that you can get ready as they read the question from the piece of paper. Another way is to have the person write down what they think your chosen number would be, peek it, and then verbally say what your answer to the question is, which of course matches their guess. This method is fine in a pinch, but it's not ideal because it's a little more convoluted and doesn't match the rhythm of the previous instance of you guessing the other person's answer. Methodologically, this routine is nothing that impressive. It's the same set of methods you can find in 13 Steps and the same presentational gusto that all reveals rely on, but it makes use of psychological science to build up a presentation that takes those simple effects and turns them into an intimate (mutual) mind reading experience for the spectator. -142-

Reactance In general, people don't like to be told what to do. As a result, when people feel pressured to hold a particular opinion or behave in a certain way, they experience an aversive state of psychological reactance (Brehm, 1966). Under these circumstances, people respond by trying to reassert the freedom that has been threatened. Examples of this abound in the world of persuasive health messages; the tricky goal of a health advocate is to deliver a message intended to change people's behavior without threatening their sense of freedom. For example, campaigns designed to reduce alcohol consumption among young people may be doomed to fail to the extent that they appear to restrict young people's freedom (e.g., Ringold, 2002). According to some theories of reactance, there are several outcomes associated with such freedom threats (Rains & Turner, 2007; Quick & Stephenson, 2007). The first and most commonly studied is the "boomerang effect."This is when people actually engage in the very behavior that was associated with the freedom threat. In other words, the more we are told we can't do something, the more we want to do it. Another outcome is the "vicarious boomerang" in which people will respond to threats to freedom not by engaging in the behavior itself but by socially associating with other people who engage in the restricted behavior. Finally, there is the "related boomerang" in which people respond not by engaging in the behavior itself but by engaging in a related behavior. As an example, imagine someone who was told that they were not allowed to consume any alcohol. That person might respond by instead engaging more in other unhealthy behaviors like eating high fat foods or engaging more in other risky behaviors like motorcycling. To give you an idea of how experimenters are able to create the feeling of reactance, consider the following introduction to a brief essay arguing for the inclusion of an advertising major at a particular university: "Here are my reasons for wanting a major in advertising at UNCG. They're good reasons, so I know you completely agree with all -143-

-of them. Because when you think about it you are really forced to agree with me because this is a universal student issue" (Silvia, 2006, p. 676). The language in the kinds of messages that often evoke reactance has been referred to as "dogmatic language" (Quick & Stephenson, 2008) and often includes phrases like "you must:"'it is impossible to deny;' and "you have to" (Rains, 2013). In fact, new research suggests that direct eye contact is associated with greater reactance, and as a result, reduced persuasive success (Chen, Minson, Schone, & Heinrichs, 2013). It is also the case that some people just tend to be more prone to responding with reactance to freedom-threatening messages than others (Quick & Stephenson, 2007). What is interesting about this, I think, is that it means that people become more predictable when their freedom is threatened than when it is not, but not in the direction most people would think. People might expect that when someone's freedom is limited, he or she might reliably comply with the request; however, the reality is that the person will reliably go in the other direction. To the extent that people initially believed they had the freedom to make their own choice (e.g., in situations where people believes they are capable of making an informed choice on their own; Wicklund & Brehm, 1968), perceiving a threat to this freedom by another person can cause the boomerang effect whereby they will move in just the opposite direction. -144-

Self-Affirmation Spe~d a mom~n~ thi~king about a value that is important to you. It m.1ght be ~r~1st1c ~kills , a sense of humor, athletics, creativity, your family or relrg1on- Just think of some value or characteristic that is important to you. As you think about it, consider why it is important to you and think of some events in your own life when that value had proved meaningful. If you took the time to do the exercise in the paragraph above, then you have just engaged in a self-affirmation, and according to the research, you are now more open to information that you might otherwise have been resistant to. For instance, if I were to present evidence that challenges a deeply held belief of yours, you would now be more open to hearing me out than if you hadn't just affirmed an important value. By using this self-affirmation technique, you can give your participants a unique, powerful tool to help themselves and also reduce an individual's resistance to you. This topic has received widespread study in social psychology, and its implications are clear, but for the sake of this book, I only aim to convey the essentials. At its core self-affirmation is when people affirm an important value, and this ~revents negative consequences of personally threaten~ng information by reducing defensiveness. The power of self-affirmation stems from people's motivation to"maintain the perceived worth and integrity of the self" (Sherman, 2013). By affirming important values, people remind themselves of their inner integrity, and it reduces the knee-jerk response to get defensive. Some have described it as a "psychological time-out" (Lyubomirsky & Della Porta, 201 O), or a chance to take a step back and re-focus on what really matters. Recent reviews of self-affirmation have noted that affirming important values broadens people's perspectives beyond a particular threat, which puts that threat in the context of a huge, expansive view of oneself, promoting an inclination to move forward rather than actively avoid threatening information (Cohen & Sherman, 2014). So what kinds of "threats" am I talking about? One domain that has -145-

received a lot of attention is health messages. In general, people are motivated not to believe that their actions are unhealthy, so they respond defensively if presented with such information. Selfaffirmation can reduce that defensiveness. In one study, for example, the researchers presented coffee-drinkers and non-coffee-drinkers with an essay about how caffeine consumption is linked to fibrocystic disease. Under normal conditions, the coffee drinkers would respond defensively to the essay- finding fault in it and ultimately not accepting its conclusions (this has been shown before; Kunda, 1987). These researchers found, however, that when participants engaged in a self-affirmation procedure, they were much more accepting of the information and even reported greater intentions to limit their caffeine intake (Sherman, Nelson, & Steele, 2000). This newfound openness to the otherwise threatening information can be traced back to a simple affirmation of an important value. The power of self-affirmation has been documented again and again, even giving rise to effective long-term solutions to education disparities, health issues, chronic stress, and interpersonal conflict (see Cohen & Sherman, 2014). Thus, one reason to consider including a mechanism for having people engage in a values affirmation is that it really is a powerful experience that your participants can come away with and use to protect against self-threats. Another reason to employ a small values affirmation, however, is that your very existence as a mentalist may itself prompt defensive thinking on the part of your audience. Therefore, if you could somehow reduce the threat you pose to someone's worldview and make people more open to your demonstrations, all the better. Across many studies, selfaffirmation has been shown to reduce defensiveness when giving people information that challenges their pre-existing attitudes and beliefs. In one early study, for example, people read a "scientific report" on capital punishment, and the researchers orchestrated the study such that people who opposed capital punishment read a report that supported it and that people who were in favor of capital punishment read a report that opposed it. That is, everyone read a report that disagreed with their personal views. Some of these people also -1 46-

engaged in a self-affirmation task whereas others didn't. Compared to those who did not self-affirm, people who thought about their most important value were more receptive to the scientific report and were less likely to criticize the message or its authors (Cohen, Aronson, & Steele, 2000). This same general pattern has been shown for lots of topics in the domain of attempts at influence (Jacks & O'Brien, 2004). All of this is to say that if you suspect people may be closed off to your claims and overly interested in figuring out the "tricks" that might underlie your abilities, encouraging something like self-affirmation may serve to reduce this closed-mindedness and open people to the experience you aim to provide them with. I'd like to note one important caveat, however. In the world of self-affirmation, if a values affirmation is intended to open people to your message, the value that people affirm needs to be unrelated to your message. By affirming a value that's related to the attitude or belief that's being threatened, you actually create greater closed-mindedness (Blanton, Cooper, Skurnik, & Aronson, 1997; Jacks & O'Brien, 2004). Thus, if your goal is to increase receptiveness to your act and reduce defensive thinking, "skepticism" should not be a value that you have people affirm. By affirming "skepticism" as a value, someone may be even further committed to rejecting your performance, and I think we'd agree that that's not what we want. Affirmation Print (Effect) This is a variant of a classic effect in which the mentalist is able to discern the first thing that a person wrote with a pen. Examples include Ned Rutleage's Voice Print, Bob Cassidy's Get the Lead Out, and so forth. The purpose of Affirmation is to maintain the mystery of the existing effect but dress it up with a self-affirmation presentation that genuinely has your participant affirm an important value, giving him or her a positive psychological experience. In fact, the procedure plays out quite similar to how affirmation has been induced in psychological research (e.g., Cohen, Aronson, & Steele, 2000). You hand a card to your participant and ask her to read what's written on it. You explain to her and to everyone watching: "This -147-

piece paper contains a list of characteristics and va~ues, some ~f which may be important to you, some of which may be ummportant. To your participant, you ask, "As you look at this list of values, focus on one that you consider most important. Of course, there may b: ~everal that.~ou would think of as important, but focus in on one. To so~1d1fy your dec1S1on for a moment, write an X on the line next to that particular value. G~eat. Start thinking about what that value means to you, and as you continue to think about this value, go ahead and put Xs next to all of the other options on the list as well. Keep thinking about your most important value, but check the rest of the lines as well. Now that she's done that, you should be left with a piece of paper with a list of characteristics or values, all of which have Xs written next to them. You take the paper back from her and show it to the audience or other onlookers. You continue: "Now there were a lot of options on this list. People value different things with different importance. It's what makes us who we are-it's what defines us. Reflecting on these important values gives a sense of integrity-a broader perspective on our lives. There were plenty of options here-artistic skills, sense of humor, relationships, social skills, romance, business skills ... and so on:' You say this as you show people the list with all of the Xs on it. Focus back in on your participant, "Jenny, keep thinking about the important value you've been thinking of. Think of an experience in your own life in which this value had been important to you and made you feel good about yourself. Think of this moment and the feelings you had at the time. Now the things that people think of when they think of these values can be very personal, so I'm not going to go too deep in that direction, but if I'm not mistaken, there's at least one other person in this memory. It's not just you alone by yourself. Does that make sense? Jenny, as you keep thinking about this, you should know that this thought exercise is a source of strength for many people. Turning our attention to the important values that define us once in a while can protect us from getting distracted by things that don't really matter. It broadens and expands our perspective, and little things that can seem so threatening and disconcerting at the time suddenly pale in comparison to what really matters. So anytime you find yourself getting bogged down by the little things, come back to this memory, or any other memory, really ... so long -148-

~s you remind yourself of how important it is ... to have an appreciation 1or the arts." Now that's quite a build-up for what's essentially a guess of what some?ne t~ou.ght of from a list, but it gives people a powerful ex~en~nce, rt grv~~ you the opportunity to do a quick reading if you're so rnclrned, and 1t.s ve~y pe:sonal without revealing deep personal secrets .. Note that m thrs scnpt, I've outlined the true impact of selfaffirmatron and framed the presentation along those lines. Also note that a simple "pick a word" becomes much bigger by having the person expand it into a personal memory, which is truly how such self-affirmation inductions are done in psychological interventions. If you find that you are quite a competent reader, then you may be comfortable trying to reveal more of the personal memory, but I find that admitting that this can be personal and it's not right to dive too far deep is pretty believable. Plus, based on the value, you could reasonably guess whether it's likely to be a memory that includes others (e.g., "social skills:"'romantic values:"'relations with friends;' or "sense of humor") or whether it's likely to be a memory that's more solitary or self-focused (e.g., "artistic skills:'"musical appreciation;' or "creativity"). But other little bits can be dropped in based on what you already know the important value to be. So what's the method? How do you already know the person's value? There are plenty of methods for this. Existing effects rely ways to make the first thing a person writes subtly different from the rest of what the person writes. Oftentimes this includes some tampering with the pen itself such that the very first stroke stands out in some way. By applying a small bit of grease to the tip of the pen, for example, you create a situation where the first X the person makes is not a bold ink line all the way through. Similarly, in Ted Karmilovich's Penguin Live lecture, he reveals a method of applying a small bit of color to the tip of a differently colored pen. The beginning of the first X written thus has a small bit of noticeable color. There have been many methods proposed, many of which will work just fine for this application. These effects often follow a "Living and Dead" test presentation by which various names are written, one of which belongs to someone who is special in some way. Ratherthan -149-