Andy Luttrell - Psychology for the Mentalist

experience stands in for a more abstract meaning. We mig~t als~ say that our feelings are hurt, that a card sleight is hard, that an intelligent person is bright, or that telling a lie makes us feel dirty. These physical qualities imply more abstract psychological experiences. Although this may be interesting as a general phenomenon of language, it seems as though our minds often treat the physical and the mental as overlapping. As food for thought, I'd like review a handful of cases where researchers have shown embodiment effects. They offer a nice overview of the power of metaphor and how relevant physical experiences can translate to psychological outcomes. First is a study (Williams & Bargh, 2008) that examined the power of physical warmth to make people view others as "warmer" in personality. We often refer to people who demonstrate happiness, generosity, and care as "warm;' so these researchers tested whether having just experienced physical warmth would make participants more likely to see a stranger as generous, caring, good-natured, etc. To do so, they merely had some participants hold a cup of hot coffee or a cup of iced coffee before participating in a person perception study. The participants who had just been holding the hot cup rated a stranger as more generous, caring, etc. than the participants who had just been holding the cold cup. There wasn't any difference, though, for how much they saw the stranger as attractive, talkative, or other traits that aren't tied to the concept of "warm" personalities. As another example, the metaphoric meaning of cleanliness can have its own psychological effects. In a clever study, Zhong and Liljenquist (2006) asked participants to think of a time when they had engaged in a behavior they might consider immoral. Under normal circumstances, recalling such an event produces a sense of guilt, and indeed, participants in the control condition reported feeling this guilt. After thinking about this past event, however, some of the participants were given an antiseptic wipe with which they had to wash their hands as part of a supposed hygiene protocol for using public computers. -50-

Compared to the participants who did not have to wash their hands, those who had the chance to make themselves physically clean did not report feeling nearly the same degree of guilt. It is as if washing their hands "washed away their sins" so to speak. Similar research has shown that exposure to a disgusting video clip led participants to cast judgment more harshly on someone else who had committed a moral transgression unless they were given the chance to wash their hands after watching the film clip (Schnall, Benton, & Harvey, 2008). These embodiment effects include a wide range of metaphorically meaningful physical sensations. Among the more unique, I think, is a recent paper that presented seven studies that showing a link between the perception of "fishy" smells and social suspicion (Lee & Schwarz, 2012). That is, following from the common metaphor of things "smelling fishy" when someone is perceived as suspicious, the actual smell of fish produces perceptions of suspicion. As an example, when participants played a game with one another in a room with a faint smell of fish in the air (vs. another non-fishy unpleasant scent), the participants played a game in a manner that suggested less trust in their opponents. In fact, other research has used incidental smells in the environment to provoke related patterns of thought and behavior. One set of studies showed that the faint smell of citrus all-purpose cleaner (imperceptible at a conscious level) led people to put more effort into keeping their work stations clean (Holland, Hendriks, & Aarts, 2005). In another set of studies, experimenters used "fart spray" to induce mild, unconscious disgust, which led people to make more severe moral judgments (Schnall, Haidt, Clore, & Jordan, 2008). Other recent developments involve the embodied effects of the clothes we wear. Just as people often offer the advice, "Dress for success;' it does seem to be the case that the clothes we wear can affect our mental states. In one recent paper, Adam and Galinsky (2012) show that merely wearing a lab coat caused people to improve their ability to pay attention to information in the environment. These kinds of effects can work in the opposite direction as well. That is, our mental experiences can change our perceptions of the physical world in metaphorically relevant ways. -51 -

To take the "warmth" example from earlier, research has shown that not only can physi cal warmth predispose someone to feel more generous and perceive generosity in others (Williams & Bargh, 2008), but when people experience social rejection, they experience the room they are in as colder than when they have not been rejected (Zhong & Leonardelli, 2010). With respect to the "cleanliness" effects, the opposite can also occur. For instance, when people engaged in an unethical behavior (telling a lie), they went on to rate a brand of mouthwash as more desirable and valuable than people who hadn't engaged in the unethical behavior (Lee & Schwarz, 2010). Finally, even newer research looking at the brain mechanisms underlying these effects suggests that the very same brain processes engaged in the physical component of the metaphor overlap with the brain processes engaged in the psychological experience (see "Social vs. Physical Pain" on page 154). With respect to the "physical" vs. "social warmth;' new research has shown that similar brain areas (i.e., middle insula and ventral striatum) are active both when people hold onto a "warm pack" (essentially a ball that people can hold while they are in a brain scanning machine-fMRl-that's continuously warm) and when they read positive messages from close friends and family members (Inagaki & Eisenberger, 2014). Embodied Presentations How might any of this be relevant to an enterprising mind reader? To start, it's interesting, and mentalists like interesting things. I expect that's not what you want to hear, though. The following are what I have to offer as ignition for your own brainstorming: As a presentational device, the notion of enclothed cognition has interesting impl ications. On stage, a participant might put on a lab coat while making a series of decisions in order to put him in a more rational mindset. Somewhat more practical, however, would be a presentational angle whereby two participants wear a pair of rings of a particular significance. In so doing, their choices while wearing these rings match a "prediction" that is framed as a description of the person who used to own the ring. -52-

As an added suggestion and convincer during a name revelation, you might incorporate the physical counterpart to the thoughts the person is thinking. For instance, if you are revealing the name of a childhood friend, you might say, "As you think of this person, all of these warm, comforting memories flood back to you. And as you imagine these pleasant experiences, you may even start to feel a little warm yourself-the warmth of the memories taking hold and producing an actual sensation of warmth:' Of course, it doesn't hurt that stage lights can actually make a person feel warmer than usual. Some research has looked at the role of physical weight and the perception of importance. We talk about important issues as "having weight;' and indeed data have shown a real relationship. In a set of studies, merely manipulating the weight of the clipboard on which participants answered the questionnaire affected measures of value and importance (Jostmann, Lakens, & Schubert, 2008). Given this finding and given the use of clipboards and books as writing surfaces in mentalism (either as impression devices or not), perhaps it is prudent to opt for somewhat heavier materials rather than overly light materials as a means of getting participants to take their roles more seriously. -53-

The Endowment Effect According to the endowment effect, people's perception of value is deeply affected by whether or not they already own whatever it is they are judging the value of. If we already have it, we see its worth as being greater than if we don't already own it. This makes perfect sense, of course, but the endowment effect still exists even if the thing has been in our possession for only a couple minutes, it was given to us without choice, and we don't even care about it that much. As an illustration, imagine I show you a mug with the logo from your favorite coffee shop printed on it, and I ask you how much you would pay for this mug. Maybe you'd say $5. Okay, now enter an alternate reality where this time I give you the mug. It's yours now. You own this mug. Now I ask you how much you'd be willing to sell that mug for. Maybe in this reality you'd say something like $8. Suddenly it's worth more! Just because you own the mug (you've been endowed with the mug), you place more value on it. You may think that this is a product of greed-when people have the power to make money, they want to make more of it. Of course, this is still somewhat irrational because any money you could make is pure profit. You didn't have this mug a second ago, if you offer it to someone else for $2.50, they're more likely to take the bait, and you come away $2.50 richer. Rather, the research has shown that the mere endowment plays tricks with our perceptions of worth. To bring us out of the land of thought experiments and into the realm of science, consider some of the first studies to document this effect (Knetsch & Sniden, 1984). In one, participants were given lottery tickets when they entered the room. The tickets were free and could be used for a chance to win $50. After finding out about the lottery, however, they were given the opportunity to sell their tickets back to the experimenters for $2. Given this opportunity, only 24% chose to sell their tickets, meaning 76% instead chose to hold onto their lottery tickets. Compare this to another group of participants, who were told about the same lottery and then given the opportunity to buy a ticket for -54-

$2. In this case, only 50% of the participants chose to buy tickets, indicating that half of these people didn't think it was worth even $2. So, the group that was given the tickets seemed to value them at greater than $2, and the other group valued the tickets at less than $2. That's quite a difference in perception for exactly the same chances of winning $50! For a somewhat less "buying and selling" example, consider another experiment in the same paper (Knetsch & Sniden, 1984). In this study, participants drew a ticket at random when they walked into a meeting room. Half of these tickets were worth $3, to be redeemed at the end of the meeting, and the other half were free lottery tickets that could be used for a chance to win $50 at the end of the meeting. Before the meeting ended, everyone was given a very simple opportunity: they could switch the ticket they had picked for the other kind. That is, if you picked the"Redeem for $3"ticket, you could switch it for the lottery ticket. Alternatively, if you had picked the lottery ticket, you could switch it for the $3 ticket. As you might expect by now, people preferred what they already had, regardless of which ticket that was. Of the people who had picked the lottery ticket at the beginning of the meeting, 82% chose to keep it, and of those who had been given the ticket redeemable for $3, 62% chose to keep it. Mentalists may be somewhat less interested in monetary transactions than social psychologists and "behavioral economists;' however. Although a lot of the work on the endowment effect is conducted to get an idea of how much people value the things depending on whether they are in possession of them or not, value need not always be measured in dollars and cents. Knetsch (1989) extended the effect to choices between two goods that are about equally valued. For participants in this study, the main point seemed to be that they were taking a survey, but the real study was in their choice of which gift they preferred to take home at the end of the study. The choice was between a free coffee mug and a Swiss chocolate bar. In the control condition, the participants were simply given this choice at the end of the study, and about half (56%) chose the mug whereas the other half (44%) chose the chocolate bar. In the other conditions, however, the participants were given one gift -55-

or the other at the start of the study. Some participants were given the coffee mug when they arrived whereas the others were given the chocolate bar. Whichever gift they were given, it simply sat on the table while they took the survey. At the end of the survey, however, the experimenters offered everyone in these conditions the chance to trade the gift they had been given for the other one. Although the results for the control condition showed that the two items were about equally valued, the choices in the two experimental conditions showed a strong endowment effect. Among the participants who had initially been given the mug, 89% chose to keep the mug. Among the participants who had initially been given the chocolate bar, 90% chose to keep the chocolate bar. It should be clear by now that the endowment effect is large and pervasive. It may also beofinteresttoyou that the effect runs very deep and may represent something of an "ancient" bias. Indeed, by varying the procedures somewhat, researchers have found an endowment effect in bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and capuchin monkeys (Brosnan, Jones, Lambeth, Mareno, Richardson, & Schapiro, 2007; Kanngiesser, Hood, Santos, & Call, 2011; Lakshminaryanan, Chen, & Santos, 2008). In these procedures, the researchers ensure that two different kinds of food are chosen by these animals about equally often and then give them one or the other. When offered the chance to trade the food they were given for the other kind, the animals show a strong preference to keep the food they've been given (although it seem to be specific to food items-the same procedure did not produce endowment effects for choices between tools even though the tools could be used to get food; Kanngiesser et al., 2011 ). To me, this effect calls out for applications by mentalists. By simply giving a participant a gift and later offering him or her the chance to trade it for a similarly valued gift, the odds are heavily in your favor that the person will turn down the trade. This, it turns out, is likely even when the other object is not that much different. Gretchen Chapman (1998) set out to show that the endowment -56-

effect would have little influence over whether people would be willing to trade for a very similar alternative, but what she found was that the influence of endowment was still present even when the alternative was similar to what people had already been given. That is, imagine you've been endowed with a Reese's peanut butter cup and later given the chance to trade for a pack of Dentyne gum-a rather different option. As you'd expect from the endowment effect, most people in this situation prefer to hold onto their candy (about 68%). However, even if they are offered a very similar alternative like a Kit-Kat bar, people still show the endowment effect and are largely reluctant to trade away the Reese's peanut butter cup they had been given (about 63% hold onto the original item). Endowment Subtlety #1: Pen Prediction Along those lines, consider the following addition to a drawing duplication routine. When you begin, you give your participant a pen as a gift for taking part. Make it clear that the pen is now his, and he can keep it to do whatever it is he'd like to do in the future: write reminders, take notes, or sign autographs when he becomes famous (this is to boost"vividness"- more on that in a bit). Eventually, you ask him to use that pen to draw something on a notecard and fold it up. You realize that you actually have another pen on you-it's essentially the same quality, but it's a different brand and maybe it's blue whereas the pen you originally gave him was black. "By the way, I also have this pen that you could have as your gift instead. Do you want to trade the pen I already gave you for this one?" Of course, there's a chance he will switch, but as we know from the endowment effect, this isn't likely. To conclude the routine, you open the prediction that's been on the table the whole time, and it says: "Not only will you choose to keep the black pen over the blue one, but you will use it to draw a house:' Now, how to predict the drawing is something I'll leave up to you, ?.ut using the endowment effect as a subtle addition gives you the ability to predict two things rather than one. In the minority of instances when the person does opt to switch -57-

pens, you have at least two options: (1) go for an alternative out that predicted the pen switch as well as the drawing or (2) drop all notion of predicting that choice and pick up with a standard drawing duplication-after all, you must know what the drawing is if you were able to have it written in a prediction. To keep from muddling up your abilities, you can still frame it as a prediction but instead present it verbally (e.g., "Although I can't be sure this is what you actually drew, I will say that what I was hoping you'd draw is a house ... can we see your drawing?"). Endowment Subtlety #2: Making a Trade Another potential mentalism application goes back to the notion of trading lottery tickets. I haven't quite worked out my own routine, but if it's a presentation that interests you, I'll share just a little bit more of the science. One of the surprising effects in the endowment effect literature is that people who are given a lottery ticket are quite resistant to the opportunity to switch their ticket for another one even though the chances of winning are the same for each lottery ticket. This resistance has even been shown when the experimenters offer an incentive for switching (e.g., Bar-Hilell & Neter, 1996). That is, even when people were offered extra cash for switching their lottery ticket with another one with identical chances of winning, they were still relatively unwilling to trade. There have been several explanations for this specific effect, chief among them being "anticipated regret:' When facing the decision between holding onto their ticket vs. swapping it for another one, people can't help but entertain the idea that their original ticket would go on to win the big prize after they chose to swap it for another one (e.g., Bar-Hilell & Neter, 1996; van de Ven & Zeelenberg, 2010). Although it's possible that people just think that their first tickets are likely to be especially lucky, Risen and Gilovich (2007) offer evidence that instead, people are prone to believe that their original tickets become more likely to win as a function of trading them away. That is, -58-

people have a superstitious belief that by trading away their lottery ticket, it makes the original ticket more likely to be the winner, and in so doing, it makes people imagine the regret they will likely feel as a result. So to prevent such a negative outcome, people just hang onto their ticket. Finally, and this is what I think mentalists should be mindful of as they try to increase the likelihood of endowment effects, people show greater anticipated regret (and thus greater reluctance to trade away what they've been given) when their current possession is more vivid. The more vividly a person can think about how they value their current possession, the less likely they are to want to trade it for an alternative. For example, if a person can vividly imagine winning a lottery with his current ticket, and he can also vividly imagine the regret he would feel if his ticket won after he traded it away, then he is much less likely to make the trade (Maimarran, 2011 ). Especially noteworth for envelope-loving mentalists is that the "low vividness" conditions in Maimarran's (2011) studies enclosed the lottery tickets in envelopes. More specifically, this study considered a very simple two-outcome lottery. Participants were given either a yellow ticket or a green ticket at the beginning of the study. To run the lottery, the experimenters used a fair coin that was yellow on one side and green on the other. The lottery was simple-if the coin lands on the color of your ticket, you win the prize. Of course, before the coin was flipped, each participant was given the opportunity to switch the colored ticket they were given for a ticket of the opposite color. Importantly, some of the participants were given their original lottery tickets as normal, but other participants were given their colored tickets in sealed envelopes, so they could never actually see the color of their tickets. The results showed that people were much less influenced by the endowment effect when their tickets came sealed in envelopes, which is to say that more people chose to take the trade when they couldn't vividly imagine winning or losing the lottery (e.g., seeing their color come up on the coin). So if you are looking to incorporate the endowment effect into a routine to get some control over whether people are likely to switch -59-

the lottery tickets they were given for different ones, it is in your best interest to make it easier for them to imagine winning with their ticket and easier to imagine the regret they would feel if their ticket wins after they traded it for another one. -60-

Fluency We process lots of different information every day, but sometimes the information is quite easy to process whereas other times it can be rather difficult. This subjective experience of ease or difficulty is what psychologists refer to as processing fluency. When you have a "fluent" experience, it means you are engaging in some activity that doesn't seem to take a lot of effort on your part. Watching a documentary in your living room on a large, clear television without distractions is a fluent experience. Watching the same documentary would be a relatively disfluent experience if it's being played on an old, small television with the sound turned down while you're seated at the back of a large group of people. Although the movie is the same and you could learn the same things from it, the experience is quite different and can have unintended consequences. Fluency not only makes it easier to process information, but it can also inform how true you think the information is, how much you like something, how confident you are in a judgment, and the extent to which you think analytically about it. First, though, let's discuss some of the ways in which information can be made more or less fluent. This can be done by manipulating how information looks and how information is communicated linguistically. Although there are plenty of ways this has been done by psychological scientists, I will review only a subsection of this literature in the hopes that I focus on the variables of greatest use for the curious mentalist. Perhaps the most intriguing way to affect fluency is to alter the visual presentation of information. Take the font, for instance. Some fonts are clearly easier to read than others (as the reader ot an_lj length_lj document written in papyrus will understand). When information is presented in a font that is small, gray, italicized, or very condensed (like this), it makes the experience of reading that information less fluent than when it is presented in a clear, legible font (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2008; Alter et al., 2007; Reber & Zupanek, 2002). Another way to use visual presentation to make information processing less fluent is to vary the contrast between the stimulus -61-

and its background (e.g., Reber & Schwartz, 1999). Black writing on a white background is quite clear, and processing the information is much easier. However, light gray writing on a somewhat darker gray background is more difficult. Information can also be made more or less fluent by carefully choosing the words you use to communicate. On the one hand, even though people often think that dense, complex communication is a sign of intelligence, it is more difficult to process that information than when the communication is clear and concise (Oppenheimer, 2006). 9 On the other hand, some words themselves are easier to pronounce than others, giving rise to greater fluency. For example, Alter and Oppenheimer (2006; 2008) specifically manipulated how easy it was to pronounce company names. A company named "Magyar Tavkoslesi Reszvenytarsasag" prompts a greater experience of disfluency than a more familiar name, for instance.Theyalsoconsideredcompany'sstockexchangetickercodes, comparing companies whose codes were pronounceable as words (e.g., "KAR") to companies whose codes were not pronounceable (e.g., "RDO"). They argued that the pronounceable codes were more fluent than the unpronounceable ones. Finally, the use of rhyming words has also been shown to produce greater fluency. McGlone and Tofighbakhsh (2000) had their participants read various aphorisms that either rhymed or did not, showing that the rhyming versions were processed more easily. Recently I heard Richard Osterlind drop the following bit of wisdom: "After the show, your prestige should grow:' What a fluent piece of advice! It may not have had nearly the impact on me if he had phrased it "After the show, your impact should increase." As we'll see later, everyone watching his lecture probably trusted the veracity of the advice more than if he'd said it without the fluency-inducing rhyme. Still other research has relied upon bodily feedback to create a sense of fluency. One simple way to do this is make people copy a paragraph using either their dominant or nondominant hand. 9 If you' ever thought science couldn't have a sense of humor, the title of this paper is one of the more entertaining ones that I've come across: "Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: Problems wi h using long words needlessly:• -62-

Doing the copy with your dominant hand evokes a feeling of fluency whereas doing so with your nondominant hand provokes a feeling of disfluency. Another common way of manipulating fluency through bodily feedback is by making people adopt specific facial expressions. Because experiences of disfluency and concentration are often associated with furrowing one's brow, experimenters have induced these feelings directly by having people adopt a furrowed brow while reading information. Similarly, experiences of fluency are associated with more positive emotions, so experimenters induce this feeling directly by having people adopt a light smile while reading information (e.g., Alter et al., 2007). So why is any of this important? As you can see, there are lots of variables that can affect whether people experience fluency, but what's more interesting is that these fluency experiences result in various reliable outcomes. As Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer (2009) argue, these outcomes don't depend on what produces the feeling of fluency in the first place; anything that evokes greater perceived processing ease gives way to the following outcomes, which include judgments of truth, liking, and confidence, as well as influencing analytical thinking. First, when people process information more fluently, they perceive that the information is more truthful than when the process is disfluent. As an example, when statements were in a font that could be clearly seen against a white background, people were more likely to believe that they were true than when the statements were printed in a font that couldn't be clearly seen against a white background (e.g., when they were printed in a yellow typeface; Reber & Schwarz, 1999). In another study, people thought rhyming sayings were more true than non-rhyming sayings even when the words themselves meant the same thing (McGlone & Tofighbakhsh, 2000).10 Second, when experiences are more fluent, they inspire greater liking for the easy-to-process stimuli. In another section of this book, I review the research on the "mere exposure effect;' (page 97) and one of the explanations for this effect is that encountering the same 1 o You'll not that the second author has an especially disfluent name. -63-

stimulus again and again inspires a feeling of fluency. That is, the more you've encountered something, the easier it is to process. Think about a TV show or movie that you have come to love. Part of what makes it enjoyable is that you're already familiar with the characters, the settings, and the plots-there's a sense of fluency. Similarly with pop music, some of what makes it enjoyable to so many people is the simplicity of that genre-it's easy to process. The research supports this relationship. For instance, if people can imagine a travel destination or owning a luxury product more easily, they prefer those items (Petrova & Cialdini, 2005; Lee & Labroo, 2004; Mandel et al., 2006). Also, when deciding between identical circles, people rate the circle that's presented against strongly contrasting backgrounds (e.g., a black circle on a white background) as more pretty and less ugly than the version presented with less contrast (e.g., a light gray circle on a dark gray background; Reber et al., 1998). In fact, some have suggested that a key determinant of what makes something "beautiful" is processing fluency (Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004). Third, fluency encourages confidence. For instance, when logic problems are printed in hard-to-read fonts, people show less confidence in their ability to solve those problems than if the same problems are printed legibly (Alter et al., 2007). Similarly, people are more confident in their answers to trivia questions when they answered them while puffing out their cheeks (i.e., high fluency), compared to when they do so while furrowing their brows (i.e., low fluency), even though their answers were actually equally accurate between conditions (Alter et al., 2007). Finally, disfluency promotes analytical thinking. Consider what's called the "Moses illusion:' You may be familiar with the "trick question'~ "How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?" Although many people respond "Two," the correct answer is that the biblical story of Moses has nothing to do with an ark (that's Noah). Answering this question correctly requires overcoming the default, thoughtless mode and instead engaging in more careful analytical thought. When the "Moses" question is presented in a hard-to-read font, people are more likely to answer it correctly (Song & Schwarz, 2008). The -64-

disfluency causes people to shake off their default responses and engage in more careful thought. In a series of four studies, Adam Alter, Daniel Oppenheimer, and their colleagues (2007) show that experiences of disfluency reduced the influence of judgment heuristics, promoted more careful analysis of persuasive messages, and improved logical reasoning ability. In a practical extension of this research, psychologists manipulated the educational materials used in high school classrooms (DiemanYauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 201 O). For some classes in the school, they made the learning materials more difficult to process by using difficult-to-read fonts or adding distortion to photocopies. Their results were striking. Across many school subjects, compared to students who used unedited materials, the students who received disfluent material went on to show better retention of the course content. Keeping Displays Fluent Beyond mere curiosity, the research on processing fluency has implications for mentalists. The first is more of a practical concern that presenters should consider. When considering how you will present a prediction, for example, keep in mind how easily the audience can read your prediction and whether you want it to be read easily or not. Similarly, if you print out instructions for any reason, be mindful of how fluent those instructions are. Many people use printed cards to collect questions for Q&A presentations. Consider the visual presentation of those cards with respect to the fluency experience you want people to have when providing their responses. Sometimes ornate and fancy design can backfire. Forcing with Fluency You can also consider the ability of fluency to serve as a foundation for a psychological force. For example, consider the following set-up that takes advantage of fluency to create a surreptitious dual reality that you can exploit. -65-

Two people who agree to participate are handed a card with a logic problem printed on it. You ask them to read the problem and to write their answer on the card. So that the other people who are watching can know what the logic problem was, you ask one of the volunteers to read it out loud and then read her answer. You ask the other person to provide her answer, and it's different. You explain that this is a trick question. It's a question where about half the people answer one way, using more intuitive thinking, and half the people answer another way, using more analytical thinking. You seemed to read your volunteers at the beginning, however, and you knew who would think in which manner. Written on the back of each person's card is the answer you predicted each person would give, and you are correct! This is a risky presentation, of course, but with careful scripting you can work out various "outs:'The main "secret" is that one person's logic problem is written in a clear font and the other person's is written in a difficult-to-read gray font. The question itself is taken from the "Cognitive Reflection Test" (Frederick, 2005), which is what Alter et al. (2007) used in their first study. The questions from this test are such that there's a default, intuitive answer but also another, correct answer that people arrive at after thinking more carefully. The question that seems applicable to a presentation environment is the following: A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? The intuitive answer that first comes to mind is "10 cents;' but it's the incorrect answer. "5 cents" is the correct answer, which most people get after giving the question a little more thought. To set up the prediction, write the logic question on two index cards. On one card, print the question in a clear font (e.g., Helvetica or Arial), and on the other card, print it in a more difficult to read font, italicized and in a gray color. On the back of the clearly written question card, write "1 O cents" and on the back of the other question card, write "5 cents:' The rest is in the presentation. Have each person ·read the puzzle and write his or her answer on the line under the question. If you can get a quick look at each person's answer, you'll know better how to play the rest of the demonstration. If you see that things went -66-

according to plan, you can present it just as I described earlier. There are, of course, ways to play things in case your participants' responses aren't consistent with your expectation. Under such conditions, you can use their answers as an insight into their thinking patterns. This is perfectly sensible because the "Cognitive Reflection Test" is used as a measurement of people's thinking patterns. Frederick (2005) showed that a person's accuracy in answering these questions is a reliable predictor of analytical thinking in general. Thus, if your participants both respond with the "correct" answer (5 cents), you can note that this means both of them are very analytical thinkers, and this will help you get inside their heads more easily. Alternatively, if they both provide the "wrong" answer (10 cents), assure them that it's a trick question and that most people get it incorrect. It does tell you, however, that they rely on intuition, which will help you get inside their heads. You get the idea. Although your prediction should play out more often than not, even if it fails, the demonstration still serves as an intriguing opening to a bigger effect framed as relevant to "intuitive" vs. "analytical"thinking. This example effect also should give you some idea of how manipulations of fluency might help secretly create a scenario where two people have different experiences even when they seem the same to the audience. This is why it's important to have one of the people read out the question because it makes it clear that the content of the question was the same for each person. Nevertheless, you've controlled the situation to encourage a particular pattern of responses. -67-

Please answer quickly. A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? :JlJJat aru{ a /Jal/ cCJt 1.10. J/le /Jot cc.st.r $1. oo more t!itm the liall. '1fowmuc!l dceJ the fiaff co rt ? -68-

The Introspection Illusion Say "Nisbett and Wilson" to any social psychologist, and he or she will know exactly what you are referring to. In a landmark paper in 1977, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson reported the results of an experiment with implications that reach throughout most-if not all- psychological phenomena. The basic point is this: people have very little conscious access to the psychological processes that guide our choices. That is, although people can accurately report their preferences or their decisions, they have very little access to the higher order mental processes that led to those preferences and decisions. When asked, however, people can readily provide explanations, but the available evidence suggests that these explanations can be more or less made up- or confabulatedon the spot. I want to describe one of the pivotal experiments in this line of research because it so strikingly resembles the procedure of a very basic mentalism effect, and one of the points you can take away is that the psychological forces that have become so interesting to mentalists, surely popularized by Banachek's first Psychological Subtleties book, do in fact induce people to settle on a thought without knowing exactly why. The researchers set up a false "consumer survey" in stores where passersby were invited to participate. They had set up four articles of clothing in a row and asked the customers to evaluate the set of items and identify which one was of the highest quality. After they made that choice, they were asked to explain why they had chosen whichever one that they had. In one version of the study, the articles of clothing were four different nightgowns, and the researchers found that there was a significant effect of position on choice; people overwhelmingly chose the item that was the rightmost one in the display. You may notice that this isn't too different from some "position effect" psychological forces that have been written about. However, although this position effect is an interesting phenomenon in itself, what is more interesting is -69-

that when asked about why they had made their choices, not a single subject (out of 378) mentioned the position of the item in the display even though that was the only reliable variable objectively predicting choices. In fact, when the researchers asked people directly whether the item's position had influenced their choice, nearly everyone said that it hadn't. Even more remarkable, I think, is that the same effect held true when instead of four different nightgowns, the choice given to the participants was between four identical pairs of nylon stockings. That is, when the only differentiating factor was the position in the display, nobody mentioned it in their rationalizing. This extends into other domains as well. For example, when people change their opinions after hearing strong persuasive arguments, they misremember their earlier attitudes and perceive very little actual change in their opinion even when their objectively measured attitudes have indeed shifted (Bern & McConnell, 1970; Goethals & Reckman, 1973). Researchers have also identified a similar phenomenon called choice blindness. The initial demonstration of this has a special place in my heart because sleight of hand was used as part of the method. Participants in the study were shown pairs of female face pictures and asked to choose the one they found most attractive; they had a 2 or a 5 second limit. After their choice, they were given their chosen picture and asked to verbally provide the reasons why they chose that particular picture over the other. This was done fifteen times, but on three of these occasions, the experimenters employed some sleight of hand so that the picture the participants were given was actually the picture they hadn't chosen. What is striking is that even when the paired faces were quite different from one another, people still didn't notice that they had been given the picture they didn't choose. Even more amazing, when asked to explain why they made the choice they did, people were readily able to offer explanations even when they were explaining why they chose a face that they hadn't actually chosen. The explanations that people gave were later coded for how much emotion was involved, how much detail was included, and the amount of confidence conveyed; there was absolutely no statistical -70-

difference between explanations of actually chosen and not actually chosen faces on these qualities (Johansson, Hall, Sikstrom, & Olsson, 2005). Introspection Subtlety Plenty of mental ism plots have people make choices, think of numbers, think of words, draw pictures, etc., but it may be a nice addition to ask people why they made the choices they did. Most of the time, what actually influences these choices is probably more banal than we'd hope if our goal is compelling theatre. However, since we know that people will easily provide explanations for their choices and behavior, it allows a revelation to be even more astonishing. No longer is the mentalist merely revealing a random thought. The power instead becomes knowing the process that the person would take to reach a final thought. Asking "why" can also obscure any covert tactics taken to influence the choice itself while simultaneously making it seem even more impossible that you could know the outcome. Of course, a person's response to such an inquiry can also be "I don't know;' in which case the revelation is just as dumbfounding. As a concrete example that comes just from a standard psychological force, you might ask someone to name the first color that comes to mind. They say "red" (along with almost everybody else who's asked to do this). Although "red" might be picked often because it's an easy color to name, if you ask the person why she chose red, she may think for a moment to rationalize what's really a random choice and respond, "it's always been a color I've liked-and my bedroom was painted red as a kid:' Now what would otherwise have been a simple color revelation has somehow become your ability to know this tiny little detail that may not have actually been the reason for the choice. -71 -

Judgment Heuristics Thinking can be hard. If you thought through every decision you make in a day, you'd still be stuck deciding whether to hold your toothbrush with your right or your left hand. While there are some decisions, like buying a house, that people will invest a lot of time in, other decisions, like which brand of canned tomatoes to buy, are made with much less thought. "Heuristics" are the mental shortcuts that people take to make judgments and decision-making operate more quickly. Psychologists love to find ways in which these heuristics can lead us astray, but the truth is, they generally work out pretty well. For example, which of the following cities in Spain is bigger: Pamplona or Valladolid? If you know that the running of the bulls takes place in Pamplona, you might have guessed that Pamplona is the bigger city. In fact, Valladolid is. The heuristic that you used is "if I've heard of it, it's probably bigger:' But even though this heuristic could lead to the wrong answer in this case, it would generally be an effective decision rule. What's bigger: Barcelona or Huelva? Madrid or Marbella? Barcelona and Madrid are the bigger cities-the heuristic would have served you well because overall, bigger cities are ones you're more likely to have heard of. This is the case with the three classic heuristics that follow. Little mental shortcuts that exist because they ease judgment and choicemaking, but we know that people use them by looking for cases when they give the wrong answer. In the anchoring heuristic, I offer some thoughts about how you could adapt this to a mentalism subtlety, but I admit that I give no application ideas for availability and representativeness. Because these are such foundational ways in which people think, however, I think you are well advised to know and understand them. Availability Think about all the words in the English language. Do you think there -72-

are more words that have R as the first letter or that have r has the third letter? If you're like most people, you would guess that there are more words with Ras the first letter. Let's do another one. Which of the following do you think happens more often: people dying of stomach cancer or people dying in car accidents? Most people tend to think car accident fatalities are more common than stomach cancer fatalities. In fact, for both of these questions, the answer that most people give is incorrect. So why is the alternative so tempting? The answer is the availability heuristic. According to this mental shortcut, when examples of something come to mind easily, we assume that they must occur frequently in the world. In general, this is a helpful strategy for making judgments of frequency or likelihood because when something occurs more often, it's easier to think of examples of it. The trouble is that this isn't a completely reliable rule. The availability heuristic can result in incorrect judgments whenever it's unusually easy or difficult to think of examples of something (e.g., words that start with a given letter vs. words with that letter in the third position). For instance, in the car accident illustration above, individual car accidents get way more media coverage than individual stomach cancer deaths. As a result, it can seem like car accident fatalities are much more common than they are. As with everything in this book, this isn't just some idea a psychologist had, but it's supported by data. In one of the first demonstrations of this heuristic, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (1973) asked people the first question I posed in this section-are there more words that begin with the letter r or that have the letter r as the third letter? As noted, it's much easier to think of words that start with rthan words with r as the third letter (even though there are actually more of the latter), so most participants in their study wrongly guessed that there were more of the former. As another example with more "real world" implications, Ross and Sicoly (1979) asked couples who were living together to think about how much they each contributed to everyday tasks. Specifically, each person in the couple judged what percentage of household chores and other tasks he or she took care of. It may come as no surprise that when these percentages were added up, they far exceeded -73-

100%, meaning at least one person overestimated his or her personal contribution. Although this may strike you as an example of people wanting to think better of themselves, some of the tasks being estimated were negative (e.g., "starting fights"), which means there must be more to the story. The availability heuristic seems to be at play- it's much easier to think of all the things that you do because you were there for all of it, whereas it's more difficult to come up with examples of all the things your partner does. As a result, you overestimate your own contributions because they come to mind more easily. Finally, the availability heuristic can come into play when you think about who you are as a person. For example, if it's very easy to think of times when you behaved aggressively, you will judge yourself to be an aggressive person (Schwarz et al., 1991 ). Representativeness Take a moment to read the following description of a person: Tom W. is of high intelligence, although lacking in true creativity. He has a need for order and clarity, and for neat and tidy systems in which every detail finds its appropriate place. His writing is rather dull and mechanical, occasionally enlivened by somewhat corny puns and by flashes of imagination of the sci-ti type. He has a strong drive for competence. He seems to feel little sympathy for other people and does not enjoy interacting with others. Self-centered, he nonetheless has a deep moral sense. (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973) If we assume that Tom is a university student, would you say he is more likely to be an engineering student or an English major? You likely perceive Tom more as an engineering student. But what if I also said that only 4% of students at Tom's school are engineering majors whereas 55% are English majors? You still may say that he's more likely to be an engineering student even though probabilistically, the chances are slim. -74-

The representativeness heuristic means that people make judgments based on how well something resembles a prototype and ignore relevant information like base rates. Base rates are the likelihood of something being true when you have no other information. In the above example, the base rate means that if we knew nothing else about Tom, there's only a 4% chance that he's an engineering student. However, because his personal characteristics match what we think of as an engineering student, we disregard the relative unlikelihood of his being an engineering student at this school. Kahneman and Tversky (1973) showed exactly this effect; participants relied on how well descriptions resembled various academic disciplines without adjusting for the base rates of students in those disciplines. This isn't to say that people shouldn't use the individual information-only that people over-rely on it without accounting for basic probability. As another example, imagine I have flipped a coin 1 O times. Which outcome seems more likely: "THHTHTTTHT" or "HHHHHHHHHH" (where H is when it lands heads and T is when it lands tails)? The former probably seems more likely, but in fact, both outcomes are equally likely. The first one just looks more "random" than the second one. In terms of the representativeness heuristic, it resembles what we think of as "randomness" more than the other sequence. To use, randomness looks like a mix of heads and tails, but by the numbers, there's no reason to predict that the first sequence is any more likely than the second. An additional implication of the representativeness heuristic is the "conjuction fallacy" (Tversky & Kahneman, 1983). Logically, the probability of two things co-occurring cannot be greater than the probability of either of those things occurring alone. However, sometimes a target of judgment can closely represent such a cooccurrence (or"conjunction"), leading to a judgment that violates the logical rule. Tversky and Kahneman (1983) gave participants what has now become a very famous description in psychology: "Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations." -75-

Now, think about which of the following seems more likely: (a) Linda is a bank teller or (b) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. Most people, when faced with these options, pick option B (the conjunction). As I just reviewed, however, it cannot be more probable that Linda is both a bank teller and active in the feminist movement than Linda just being a bank teller. However, because the description so closely resembles what we would think of as a feminist bank teller, the logical conclusion is overlooked in favor of what seems intuitively more likely. Anchoring How tall do you think Mt. Everest is? Is it greater than or less than 1 ,500 feet tall? You'd probably say it's taller than 1 ,500 feet, but how tall exactly? Think about it-actually come to an estimate. The correct answer is written on page 80. Go check to see how close you were. Did you over- or under-estimate? According to research on the anchoring heuristic, you likely guessed a number that was lower than the correct answer. If I had initially posed the question differently, however, you might have over-estimated the height. That is, if I had started by asking whether the answer was greater than or less than 60,000 feet, you'd probably say "less than" but then go on to make an actual guess that was higher than the correct answer. The reason forth is is the anchoring and adjustment heuristic. According to this heuristic, when people don't have a confident estimate for something, they can arrive at a judgment by adjusting away from some anchor number. The problem is that people tend not to adjust enough, a phenomenon referred to as "insufficient adjustment:' In the previous example, I gave you an anchor that was either too low or too high; to arrive at an actual estimate, people start to test whether increasingly high or low values seem accurate. When they hit upon a reasonable number, they stop and provide that estimate. People often stop too early, providing estimates heavily informed by the arbitrary value they started with (e.g., Jacowitz & Kahneman, 1974). -76-

What's interesting is that these anchor values can be totally arbitrary and they still influence people's estimates. For example, when participants were trying to guess the percentage of African countries in the United Nations, the researchers spun a "Wheel-of-Fortune" type of wheel with numbers between O - 100. For whichever number the wheel landed on, participants responded with whether they thought the real answer was more or less than that number and then revealed their final estimates. If the wheel had landed on 10, participants tended to say about 25% of countries in the UN are African, but if the wheel happened to land on 65, they tended to say about 45% of countries in the UN are African (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). That's a pretty big difference in estimates, and it comes from a random change in a completely arbitrary value. Even more impressive is that not only can these anchors be arbitrary, but they can be completely unrelated to the judgment being made. These kinds of anchors have come to be known as "incidental anchors"-numbers in one's environment that can have a big effect on unrelated estimates (Critcher & Gilovich, 2008). For instance, participants in a study received a description of a college football player and a picture of him during a game. They were asked to report how likely they thought this player would be to do well in a playoff game. Two groups of people made this judgment, and everything was the same between the two groups except for one thing-the number on the player's jersey in the photo was either "54" or "94:' Amazingly, the people who saw the picture with the "94" estimated that the player was more likely to do well than the people who saw the picture with the "64:' As another example, participants were given a description of a restaurant and askedtoreporthowmuch money they would be willing to spend there. Once again, two groups made this judgment, and the only difference between them is that for one group, the restaurant's name was "Studio 17" and for the other group, the restaurant's name was "Studio 97." People reported that they were willing to spend more money when they thought the restaurant was called "Studio 97"than when they thought it was called "Studio 17 :' -77-

Anchoring Subtlety If someone has to make an estimate in a situation where they don't know the exact answer, it's very likely that they will start by thinking of a related anchor that they already know and then adjust away from that to come to their answer. This is what's called a "self-generated anchor" (Epley & Gilovich, 2006). For example, if you ask people to estimate what the highest possible body temperature is, they will start at 98.6 degrees (the normal human body temperature) and then adjust up from there to arrive at a judgment. Alternatively, if you ask someone how many days it takes Mercury to orbit the sun, he will likely to start at 365 (the number of days it takes Earth to do so) and then adjust downward. Of course, even in these situations, people don't adjust far enough (Epley & Gilovich, 2006), but this process gives you insight into someone's thinking. Although it may be common sense, this added subtlety gives you the chance to tell someone not only what number they're thinking of but also how they arrived at that number. Here's a basic presentation premise. Ask someone to estimate the number of days it takes Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, to complete its orbit around the Sun. In other words, how many days are in Mercury's year? The volunteer makes this estimate and writes down his guess on a small piece of paper (surprise-you peek the number). In a normal reveal, you could just reveal what you think the guess is. Using this anchoring and adjustment premise, however, your reveal can go something like this: Of course, you didn't already know the answer to the question-most non-astronomers have no idea. Whats interesting, though, is that different people go about coming up their guesses in different ways, and this thought process can signal how you think about things in general. I have a feeling you started by thinking about how many days it takes the Earth to go around the Sun365 days. It seemed like you kept testing smaller and smaller numbers, moving down from 365 until you hit a number that seemed appropriate for little of' Mercury. -78-

What5 interesting, though, is I don't think you went quite far enough. You stopped the nrst time the number felt pretty much right. The actual answer is about 80 days, but I think you stopped at a number higher than that ... something around 150 or 160 days? This, of course, depends on the person actually having written a number that makes sense with this reveal, which according to the research, should be most of the time. Also, as long as you get the final number correct, it's not as important if you accurately described their thought process. The person may not have been conscious of this process but as you describe it, it might resonate with him, feeling like it is actually how he arrived at that number even if he didn't realize it at the time. You can also play this in a slightly different way. The reveal I've written here is such that it feels tailored the person who came up with the guess. Instead, you could say all of this as if it were a prediction by describing "what most people do:' That is, "here's what people tend to do ... they start with 365 and work their way down, ending up at around 150 or 160:' Although this has a certain intrigue, I think it takes away from making it a unique experience for the person. Instead, knowing what most people do can make it look like you know what one person does specifically. I bring this up, however, to offer you the opportunity to think through what fits with the particular abilities you claim to have. -79-

(The correct answer to the question is that Mt. Everest is about 29,000 feet tall.) -80-

Linguistic Styles James Pennebaker and his colleagues have done some impressive research highlighting the incredible amount of information hidden in our patterns of speaking. Surprisingly, the words we might expect to be important aren't the ones this research focuses on. It's what Pennebaker sometimes calls "junk words" that can be so telling. In more traditional linguistic parlance, these are "function words;' and they are the words that hold sentences together: pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, etc. (e.g., "and;' "in," "I;' "you;' and "with"). Although these words may not strike you as being all that powerful, Chung and Pennebaker (2007) write: Whereas the average native English speaker has an impressive vocabulary of well over 100,000 words, fewer than 400 are function words (Baayen, Piepenbrock, & Gulikers, 1995). This deceptively trivial percentage (less than 0.04%) of our vocabulary accounts for over half of the words we use in daily speech (Rochon, Saffran, Berndt, & Schwartz, 2000). Chung and Pennebaker (2007) use a very simple sentence to illustrate just how complex these words can be and why they call for such sophisticated social knowledge: I can't believe that he gave it to her. Without an understanding of who the "l;'"he," and "she" is or what the "it" is, the sentence doesn't make any sense. Even more compelling, however, are their data that show that people differ systematically in how often they use these different words, and these differences predict important social outcomes like depression and general health. Take personal pronouns (e.g., "me") for example. People differ in how often they refer to themselves in written and spoken communication. For example, women use personal pronouns more often than men do; however, men use more nouns and articles, signifying a tendency to categorize and think concretely (Newman et al., 2003). Use of first person singular pronouns like "my" also decreases with age, and they are replaced by more first person plural pronouns like "our" (Pennebaker & Stone, 2003). Social status is also a reliable predictor -81 -

such word use; use of the word 11 1:' for example, is more frequent for people of low (vs. high) social status (Pennebaker & Davis, 2006). Imagine having to send an email to your boss and to an employee. The research would predict that the email you send to your boss would have more first person pronouns in it than the email you send to your employee. Thefrequencyof personal pronoun use also corresponds to important social outcomes such as depression. For instance, in an analysis of surreptitiously recorded everyday speech samples, study participants who scored higher on a depression scale used the personal pronoun "I" more frequently than those who scored lower on the depression scale (Mehl, 2004). In an interesting analysis of poetry, Stirman and Pennebaker (2001) compared the language of poets who went on to commit suicide and the language of poets who did not commit suicide. The poets who did commit suicide used significantly more first person pronouns in their poetry than the nonsuicidal poets, suggesting that they were more focused on the self. Although depression is associated with a focus on the self, Pennebaker has also shown that large-scale social stressors correspond to a decrease in using ''I:' Examples of such stressors that have been studied empirically are national tragedies like Princess Diana's death and local tragedies like a deadly accident at a university. One of the most compelling studies, I think, examined public blog posts on the website LiveJournal written during the two months preceding and the two months following 9/11 (Cohn, Mehl, & Pennebaker, 2004). Within just hours of the 9/11 attacks, the frequency of personal pronouns in LiveJournal posts dropped significantly and remained below the baseline for the full two-month duration. Importantly, though, these effects were specific to first person singular pronouns (e.g., "I" or "me") because just as these pronouns decreased in frequency, the use of first person plural pronouns (e.g., "we" or "us") increased in frequency. Thus, socially shared tragedies shift focus away from seeing ourselves as individuals, and we instead focus on our embededness in a broader group. Personal pronouns, of course, are just one of many kinds of function words, but I hope that the preceding review is illuminating. Other -82-

research has looked at the use of positive and negative emotion words tha~ peopl~ use in communications (e.g., Pennebaker & King, 1999), finding, for instance, that personality traits like extraversion and agreeableness are associated with greater use of positive emotion words whereas personality traits like neuroticism are associated with greater use of negative emotion words. A New Cold Reading System? So what does this mean for mentalists? Well, I don't know exactly, but I find this research very interesting, and the fact that it deals with subtle ways in which people let their personalities and inner thoughts leak out without being aware of it makes it an ideal premise in mental ism. It also strikes me as an interesting vehicle for cold reading. In much the same way that "handwriting analysis" offers an opportunity to read a person through what seems like more "scientific" means (aka less "psychic"), "linguistic style analysis" could offer similar possibilities. A modern type of reading could involve a sitter pulling up an email he or she has written on a smart phone; the reader can then gain impressions from the relative use of "junk words" like pronouns and connectors to develop a detailed reading for the person. Language Style Matching There's an additional development to the research on "linguistic styles" that is worth mentioning, and that is language style matching. You may already be familiar with the concept of "matching and mirroring;' a technique often attributed to "neuro-linguistic programming" and offered as a means of gaining rapport. In short, by adopting another person's subtle nonverbal behaviors and rate of breathing, you can induce a much stronger rapport with that person. Similarly, the match between two individuals' linguistic styles can serve as a strong indicator of closeness. Molly Ireland and colleagues (201 O) demonstrated this in two compelling studies. In the first, they recorded verbal interactions during a speed dating experience and measured the participants' -83-

interest in going on a date with the other people they interacted with. They then used computer software to extract unique patterns of function word use by individuals during the interactions. The data showed that the more a pair of individuals matched in their individual language patterns, the more likely it was that they later indicated mutual romantic interest in one another. In another study, the researchers analyzed instant message exchanges between couples over a 10-day period and assessed their degree of linguistic similarity. They then contacted these couples three months later to see whether or not they were still in a relationship. Once again, the data showed that the more the couples demonstrated similar linguistic styles during their communications, the more likely they were to still be in relationships three months later. The research on language style matching is still very new, and it is difficult to say whether a person might be able to strategically employ a similar linguistic style to build rapport in the same way that mirroring someone's overt nonverbal behaviors could. It does, however, shed light on the importance of the words you use as a performer and how they might interact with the language styles of sitters or audience members. -84-

Memory Demonstrating False Memory This has floated around the mental ism community now and again, but it is a powerful, purely psychological demonstration of remembering something that never happened. You can use this as a lead-in to a related effect or as a demonstration of your vast knowledge of human psychology and how thoughts can be bent and influenced. Psychologists call the demo I'm about to describe the "DeeseRoediger-McDermott" (ORM) Paradigm. In essence, people are exposed to a list of words and later given another short word list, which contains some words that were in the original set and some new words. The person's job is to say whether each word in the "test" list was in the original one or is new. That is, does the person remember having just heard or seen each of the words? Using specially designed lists, people overwhelmingly falsely say that a word was in the original list when that word is only related to the words that were actually on the list (Roediger & McDermott, 1995). For example, when people are exposed to the original list containing words like "nose, breathe, sniff, aroma, nostril;' and so on, if you ask them whether the word "smell" was on the list, most people will say "yes" (and they will be very confident!) even though it was not actually on the list. People don't have time to individually encode every word on the original list, so instead they encode the "gist" of the list. When I use this as a demonstration for people in a mentalism setting or for students in my class, I tend to use the "sleep" list, which has been shown to be among the more effective lists for producing false recognition (see Stadler, Roediger, & McDermott, 1999). I say, "I'm about to read off a list of words. Your job is to simply pay attention and try to remember the list as best you can. Afterward I'll give you a little quiz. Ready?" Then I read off the following list of words fairly rapidly but not so -85-

fast that it seems like I'm rushing: bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, wake, snooze, blanket, doze, slumber, snore, nap, peace, yawn, drowsy. Finally, I give them the test. If I'm doing this for an individual, I ask them to give me audible responses to whether they think each word was on the list I read out. If I'm doing this for a large group, I usually ask everyone to silently answer in their own minds whether each word was on the list. As a way to make this more visual (and to reinforce how effective it is), you can also ask the audience to give a thumbs-up if they think the word was on the original list or a thumbs-down if they think it was not. Here are the words I use for the memory quiz: Dream. Shoe. Sleep. Yawn. Of course, "shoe" was not on the list, and most people will get that right. Also, "dream" and "yawn" were on the list, which most people will also get right. "Sleep;' however, did not appear on the list, but people will be sure that it was. The sleep-related list that I provided is not the only list you can use. Researchers have developed and tested many such lists. Another list that's been shown to effectively produce false recognition is the "window" list (door, glass, pane, shade, ledge, sill, house, open, curtain, frame, view, breeze, sash, screen, shutter). For more, I would advise you to look at the paper by Stadler, Roediger, and McDermott ( 1999) where they test these various lists for how well they produce false recognition. You can go straight to their appendix on the last page that provides all of the lists they tested. In particular, the lists that produced a greater than 80% rate of falsely recognizing the target words are: window, smell, cold, rough, cup, soft, and sleep. There are a couple caveats that are worth noting with regard to this demo. The first should be obvious, but don't tell people in advance exactly what's going on. That is, don't say that you're about to read off a list of words that are all associated with another word that isn't itself included in the list and that later you'll see if they falsely remember hearing that related word. One study compared the performance of people who received such a warning against people who didn't, and not surprisingly, those who received the warning were less li.kely to falsely recognize hearing the target word (Neuschatz, Benoit, & Payne, 2003). -86-

The other thing to consider, however, is how quickly you should read off the original list of words. In general, the research suggests that reading the list too slowly reduces the likelihood that people will falsely remember hearing the target word. One study compared the results for three different presentation rates: pausing for half a second between words, pausing for one second between words, and pausing for three seconds between words. The results clearly show that shorter pauses between words (i.e., reading the list faster) resulted in higher rates of false recognition (Gallo & Roediger, 2002). So, as I suggested in describing the demo, you're better off reading through the list fairly quickly but not so quickly that it sounds like you're trying to trick them in the memory task. This may seem like a lot of information for what is essentially a quick demonstration of your ability to induce false memories, but I hope this also illustrates a broader point about using the results of psychology experiments to craft micro-demonstrations that lend credibility to your claims (if you adopt the psychological angle) or that shine a light on your audience's thoughts and how malleable they can be. -87-

Mental Imagery Think back to when you were a young child. Imagine a typical day in your life as a young child. Imagine that time; see the memory in your mind's eye and focus on who you were way back then. Just as everyone grows and changes, you can remember, by seeing this image from your past using your mind's eye, just how different you were from who you are now. You should be able to imagine these details from your past-who was around, the environments you inhabited, and so on. Hold onto this remembered image. We'll return to it later. Although the mental "images" that come to us throughout the day can be in various modalities (e.g., sound, as in remembering a song), by far the most common mental imagery experience is visual (Kosslyn et al., 1990). For most people, it isn't difficult to visually see events from the past. And just as our memories can be visual, so too can we simulate imagined events that we have never experienced before, which is a process that depends upon the memories we already have (Schacter et al., 2012). All of this is the mentalist's bread and butter. How many times do you ask people to imagine something t hat happened to them as you proceed to reveal the very image they've built up? Often times this is accomplished by somehow knowing generally what a person will be imagining (e.g., peeking a short written description or relying on psychological tendencies), but reading the image that someone has built up is often a cold reading of sorts, guided by the mind reader's own associations with the topic. For instance, you ask someone to write down something that represents a childhood memory, they write down "snowboarding;' and you commence a detailed reading by drawing on your own associations with the word •snowboarding:' Some research in psychology, however, has examined the kinds of images people tend to create when recalling events from their past. This section reviews this research in hopes of arming you with extra bits to layer into such "mental image" readings. -88-

First, as a brief background, it seems that visual mental imagery relies on much the same mental processes as regular ol' vision. That is, as far as your brain is concerned, the images we imagine and the images we see in the real world are quite similar-they both rely on many of the same neural mechanisms to be processed. For instance, neuroscientists have long known thatthere are parts of the brain used to process faces when we look at them whereas other parts entirely are used to process places when we see them. It turns out those same specific parts of the brain are used when people are asked to merely imagine faces or places in their minds (O'Cravens & Kanwisher, 2000). Similarly, when people imagine seeing geometric shapes, their brain activity is nearly indistinguishable from the brain activity associated with actually seeing those shapes (Klein et al., 2004). Indeed, when neuroscientists induce a focused magnetic current over an area of the visual cortex, a part of the brain long known to process visual stimuli, it disrupts participants' ability to engage in a task that relies on using imagined visual imagery (Kosslyn et al., 1999). But what are some actual components of visual mental images? One of the more obvious qualities is vividness. Some visual images we can create are much more vivid than others. Mentalists often request that participants make their mental images as "vivid" as possible. With a playing card, the image can only be so vivid. But for our visual memories from the past, there are many details that can be vividly represented in our mental images. Across many different images, however, there are individual differences in how vividly people imagine things, which means some people remember things very vividly (on average) and other people tend to remember them less vividly. Psychologists measure this individual attribute by simply providing study participants with several visual images and asking how vividly they can imagine them. People who tend to form very vivid mental images are also especially likely to remember details of events that they see. For instance, after watching a videotaped interview, so-called "vivid imagers" accurately recalled more details from the interview than "non-vivid imagers" (Swann & Miller, 1982). Besides memory, how vividly people imagine things also has implications for cravings and -89-

addiction. Food cravings, for example, can depend on how vividly people imagine the foods that they crave (Kemps & Tiggemann, 2005). In research that directly reduces the vividness of food imagery, participants demonstrate correspondingly lower food cravings (Kemps et al., 2004; 2005). Before moving onto the next interesting component of mental images, let's test your own powers of vivid memory-based mental imagery. Think of a recent experience when you felt angry or upset. Imagine that time; see the memory in your mind's eye. Take note of the details in the image in your mind, and really try to focus on the emotion that you felt at the time. In particular, as you visualize this event, you could be seeing it from two different perspectives. On the one hand, you may be seeing things from the first-person perspective, meaning that in your memory, you are looking out at your surroundings using your own eyes. On the other hand, you may be seeing things from the third-person perspective, meaning that in your memory, you can actually see yourself as well as your surroundings. According to research on such perspectives, you are likely to have thought of this memory-a recent ti me when you feltangryorupsetusing a first-person perspective. That is, you likely re-imagined this event as you yourself saw it at the time. However, according to the same research, you were likely to have thought of the memory from earlier in this section-about when you were a young child-using a third-person perspective. That is, you were looking at yourself as a child, as if you were a fly on the wall in your own memory. Whether or not you imagined the two scenarios from the perspectives I "predicted;' the research shows that on average, this is the trend. Lisa Libby and her collaborators have conducted extensive research on "imagery perspective" (Libby & Eibach, 2011 ). Much of their research manipulates whether people imagine a scenario using first- vs. third-person perspective. Of greater interest to mentalists, I think, is the research that predicts when people use one style vs. the other. According to this research, there are several reliable predictors of which perspective people take in their memories. Time: The older the memory, the more likely people are to remember it from the third-person perspective (Nigro & Neisser, 1983; Robinson -90-

& Swanson, 1993; Rozett, 1986; Talarico, LaBar, & Rubin, 2004). This seems to be the most studied association. Memories from long ago are re-imagined from third-person perspective whereas memories from quite recently are re-imagined from the first-person perspective. This is why, in the first memory exercise, I had you remember a time from when you were a young child. The second memory, by contrast, was "of a recent experience." In doing so, I was hoping to nudge your mental image toward one visual perspective over another. Feelings: When people are instructed to focus on the feelings they experienced at the time of whatever event they are remembering, they are more likely to use the first-person perspective. As opposed to describing "concrete, objective circumstances;' re-living the emotions and feelings one felt at the time encourages use of first-person perspective (Nigro & Neisser, 1983). Also, the more the memory is characterized by relatively intense emotion, the more likely people will adopt the first-person perspective (Talarico, La Bar, & Rubin, 2004). This is why I asked you to think of a time when you felt angry or upset (relatively intense emotions) and why I specifically said, "really try to focus on the emotion that you felt at the time:' All of this was meant to encourage first-person perspective. Self-Change: When visualizing a memory, people are more likely to use the third-person perspective if what they're remembering seems inconsistent with who they are now (Libby & Eibach, 2011; Libby, Eibach, & Gilovich, 2005). In the example I used at the start of this section, I was careful to include the following element: "focus on who you were way back then. Just as everyone grows and changes, you can remember, by seeing this image from your past using your mind's eye, just how different you were from who you are now:' By highlighting the differences between who you were then and who you are today (at least as far as you perceive it), I was hoping to push your image further into the domain of "third-person perspective:' Action Direction: In one study of people's childhood memories, people were more likely to use the third-person perspective when remembering when something specific"happened to them" and more likely to use the first-person perspective when it was a memory of something specific that they "remember doing" (Libby, 2003). Thus, -91-

just by framing the memory as being something a person"remembers doing" vs. something that person remembers "happening to her" is enough to alter how the memory is re-imagined. Imagery in Emotional Memory In collecting the research for this section, I came across a paper whose findings offer clear application to the mentalist. Given many mind readers' focus on the emotional component of their demonstrations, it would be valuable to know how visual mental imagery changes depending on the emotional content of what's being imagined. There are plenty of effects in mentalism in which someone chooses from a selection of discrete emotions (e.g., anger, happiness, etc.), which serves as the basis for something like a memory that the mentalist then "reads:'11 Rather than tip these existing methods, I'll just ask you to imagine that you're in a position where your participant is now remembering a time in his or her life when he or she felt a particular emotion (that you sneakily enough happen to already know). As the participant re-imagines this memory, what are likely to be the visual elements of her scene? As I just discussed, it's true that when people are focused on felt emotions in general, they tend to use the first-person perspective to re-imagine the event. However, recent research by Talarico, LaBar, and Rubin (2004) offers us some interesting patterns unique to specific kinds of emotions. In their research, they assessed twenty different emotions, and they simply asked people to recall a time when the felt a particular emotion. That is, a participant in this study might be asked to think of a time when she felt especially disgusted, amused, or lonely. In response, everyone wrote a brief description of the memory and then answered several questions about the individual properties of the memory. The researchers were interested in many such properties, including 11 Surely many will be familiar with Luke Jermay's popularization of this premise in Emotional Intelligence, but similar premises can be found in Sean Waters' Ode to Eckman and Bruce Bernstein's Emotion, to name a few. -92-

vividness and first- vs. third-person perspective, which we've already discussed, but also things like "rehea rsa I" (how often they had thought or talked about the memory since the event itself) and "confidence" (how much they thought the details truly reflect the event itself or are instead mostly imagined). To understand their results, you need to understand just a bit about how psychologists think about emotions. According to many psychological scientists, all emotions can be defined by their valence (i.e., positive vs. negative) and intensity or arousal (the socalled "circumplex model"; Russell, 1980). This view allows us to draw comparisons between discrete emotions. For instance, although being excited and being frustrated are similarly intense feelings, they differ in their valence-one is a positive emotion and the other is negative. In a similar way, even though "anger" and "boredom" are both negative emotions (i.e., same valence), they differ in intensity. So, even though Talarico et al. (2004) assessed memories for 21 different emotions, their results look at how the properties of the memories correlate with valence and intensity, rather than looking at how the properties differ from one emotion to the next. That is, they clump these emotions into four categories: high intensity positive, high intensity negative, low intensity positive, and low intensity negative (see the table in this section for the exact categorizations). Their results suggest that it's the intensity of the emotion that has a bigger impact on these memory imagery properties than the valence. To carry on with the example emotions from before, we might say that the ways in which we visually represent our "anger" and "excited" memories are more similar than the ways in which we visually represent our"anger" and "boredom" memories. Here are some highlights from their results. In general, memories in which people felt relatively intense emotions were characterized by the following: • Greater feelings of recollection. It was associated by more of a feeling of reliving the experience and traveling back to the time -93-

when it happened . • A greater sense that the details in the memory were accurate . • More vivid imagery, including visual, spatial, and auditory vividness. That is, a greater ability to see and hear the m~mory in the person's mind and recall the exact setting where 1t took place . • Greater sense that the scene is being looked at once again through the person's own eyes (i.e., first-person perspective) . • A greater sense of experiencing the same emotion at the moment of recalling the original experience (i.e., reliving the memory) . • Increased reports of having thought or talked about the memory since it happened . • A greater sense of recalling the event as a coherent story rather than as a jumbled mix of images that don't fit together as a narrative. Valence had several effects as well, however. For instance, memories coming from more positive emotions were experienced as having a stronger narrative (i.e., the memory makes a relatively coherent story) whereas negative emotional memories were more fragmented. Valence was also related to greater recollection whereby more positive emotions were associated with a greater feeling of reliving the experience and traveling back to the time when it happened. To give you a greater sense of how to wrap your head around these patterns, here are the emotions these researchers considered, categorized by their relative intensity and valence (as indicated by responses in these very studies). I've included only the highest and lowest "intensity" emotions because there is no strict cutoff; this should be sufficient for you to get a sense of how different specific emotions are likely to be re-experienced through visual mental imagery. -94-

Negative Emotions Positive Emotions Bored Relieved Low Intensity Embarrassed Amused Annoyed Calm Ashamed Excited High Intensity Sad Happy Angry Proud This information can all be used to weave subtleties into the readings that can accompany an effect that at its core is merely revealing a "randomly selected" emotion. So imagine somebody has selected "excited" and is now thinking of a recent time when she felt excited. Given the qualities that are associated with autobiographical memories of intense emotion, you might begin your revelation like this: Try to see this memory in your mind. As you continue to visually remember this event, I get the impression that you're able to remember this event very vividly. The visual details, the things you can hear, the space you're in ... all of this is really vivid in your mind. Certainly more vivid than any random memory. You also show signs of really re-living this event rather than just imagining it. You can feel tingles of the emotion again, and it feels like you yourself have traveled back in time to see this happen again. I also get the sense that you are re-living this memory from your own perspective. Sometimes people remember events in a way where they are seeing it from a 3rd_person perspective and they can see themselves in the scene, but I get the sense that you are seeing this out of your own eyes-does that makes sense? I'd also say that the vision in your mind is truly what you think happened-you're reasonably confident that this -95-

is what it looked like at the time ... you aren't just making up details for the sake of the exercise. It actually seems like this isn't a private memory, either- this is something you've talked about with other people since it happened, right? Something worth talking about ... a positive experience in your life. At this point, you move into the specific reading of the content of the memory, moving away from impressions of the person's memory experience. As you can see, the details in the above "reading" are derived from the qualities that tend to accompany memories of high intensity emotional experience ("excitement;' in this case), and it creates the illusion that you're looking into the person's mind and actually seeing the memory. In other words, it shows the process of mind reading rather than just knowing an emotion. -96-

The Mere Exposure Effect You have probably had the experience of hearing a new song and not caring for it much at first, but after hearing it a number of times, you find that you really do enjoy the song and catch yourself humming it when you least expect to. This phenomenon is the mere exposure effect. Essentially, the more a person is exposed to something, the more that person comes to like it. In other words (and contrary to the catchier saying), familiarity breeds liking. In the original demonstration of this effect, Zajonc (1968) showed his participants stimuli for which they did not already have particularly extreme evaluations (e.g., foreign words, Chinese characters, or faces of strangers). The stimuli were shown for a pre-determined number of repetitions, depending on the group to which the participants had been assigned, so before people rated how much they liked the image or word, they had already seen it anywhere from 1 to 25 times (or in some cases, they were seeing it for the first time). The results were clear: the more they had already been exposed to the stimulus, the more they reported liking it. This effect also occurs across a range of things, including paintings, colors, flavors, and geometric figures (Murphy, Monahan, & Zajonc, 1995). One of my favorite demonstrations of this effect comes from Moreland and Beach (1992). They arranged for four different women (of similar appearance) to attend a college class a certain number of times throughout the semester. One of these women didn't actually attend at all, one attended five times, one attended ten times, and the last woman attended fifteen times. These women did not interact with the students at all; they only sat in on the lecture. At the end of the semester, the students in the class were given pictures of each of the women and rated them on several dimensions like physical attractiveness. Despite never having interacted with these women, the students showed clear preferences depending on how frequently the women had attended the class. That is, they evaluated the woman who they -97-

had seen 15 times much more positively than the woman they hadn't seen at all. One explanation that has been offered up for the mere exposure effect is what psychologists call "perceptual fluency:' Essentially, we like things that are "fluent" or easy to process (Wikielman & Cacioppo, 2001 ). For example, people might like a simple pop song because of its simplicity-it doesn't take a lot of mental work to appreciate the song and therefore, it gets associated with the positivity of the easyto-process experience. It is similar with mere exposure; the more times you are exposed to something, the more familiar it is, and the easier it is to process, developing a more positive evaluation (Bornstein, 1989; Monahan, Murphy, & Zajonc, 2000). For more, see the section on fluency elsewhere in this book (page 61 ). A meta-analysis of existing work on the mere exposure effect by Robert Bornstein (1989) identified some conditions that are particularly conducive to this effect happening. First, the effect is stronger when the stimulus is presented for relatively brief durations, and the size of the effect tends to level off after 10-20 repetitions, which suggests there are diminishing returns with very frequent exposures. He also found that the effect tends to be enhanced when there is a delay between stimulus exposure and the ratings of the stimuli, and in some cases, there was still an effect of the repeated exposure two weeks later! Procedures that use subliminally presented stimuli actually produce an enhanced effect, compared to ones that use brief presentations where the person can actually recognize the stimulus. It also seems to be the case the mere exposure effect does not work as strongly with children because kids tend to prefer novel (vs. familiar) stimuli. Finally, the effect seems to be especially strong for more complex stimuli (e.g., this effect is stronger for complex line drawings, compared to simple line drawings). It may be possible to take advantage of the mere exposure effect to nudge people toward making a particular choice. That is, when given a choice between four playing cards under the instructions to "choose which one you like the best-go with your gut on this one;' the person may show a preference toward a card that he had been -98-

repeatedly, although unknowingly, exposed to earlier. Mentalists often deal with such complex symbols like playing cards and Tarot cards, so repeated exposure to one of these cards in the context of another demonstration or a set of instructions (and then given the choice after a brief delay), you might find that the increased liking for the force card nudges the participant to choose that one from a small group of options. -99-