The Physical Advantage
/In Toronto this past spring, we did some focus-group testing on the impact of a digital prediction versus a physical prediction. We’ve looked at this before, but we wanted to do some additional testing because this feels like one of those areas where the data will always be in flux. Our relationship with technology—and the technology itself—is constantly evolving. Here’s what we looked at:
Creepy Child Variation of Directed Verdict with a paper reveal.
Creepy Child Variation of Directed Verdict with an Instagram reveal.
Lottery Prediction with a physical paper reveal.
Lottery Prediction with a photo reveal on the magician’s camera roll.
Lottery Prediction with a photo emailed to the participant before the effect.
Twenty-five individuals saw each of the first two effects. Twenty individuals saw each of the final three. There was no overlap between any of these groups. In total, 110 individuals saw one of these effects, among other things we tested.
For the Creepy Child effect, the participants shuffled and cut the deck. The card they cut to matched either a folded paper prediction or an old Instagram post featuring a drawing—both supposedly created by some creepy kid the magician knows.
For the Lottery effect, the participants freely named numbers. Those numbers were either printed on a physical lottery ticket in the magician’s wallet, shown in a picture of a lottery ticket on the magician’s camera roll, or shown in a picture of a lottery ticket sent to the participant as an email attachment before the trick began.
We asked the participants to rate each effect on only one metric: how impossible it felt.
Results
For the Creepy Child effect
The digital version scored a 7.0.
The physical version scored an 8.4.
For the Lottery effect
The camera-roll version scored a 7.3.
The email-attachment version scored an 8.2.
The physical-ticket version scored a 9.1.
Takeaways
It may seem like there’s only a point or two separating these variations, but that point or two actually represents a very significant difference.
Having done this testing for over a decade now, we know that unless we spend a significant amount of time explaining how to rank the effects on a scale from 0 to 10, any effect that fools someone will receive at least a 5.5 or 6—even the most basic one-in-four multiple-out effect. At the high end, people are hesitant to call anything a perfect trick—at least when they feel like they’re trying to provide an accurate rating for data purposes—so most people won’t go beyond a 9.5, even when they genuinely have no idea how something was done. In practice, then, the scale runs from about 5.8 to 9.5.
That gives us a meaningful range of only 3.7 points. Viewed within that range, the 1.4-point advantage of the physical Creepy Child prediction over the digital version represents nearly 40% of the entire usable scale. With the Lottery Prediction, the 1.8-point gap between the camera-roll reveal and the physical ticket represents nearly half of that scale. Put another way, on the portion of the ten-point scale that people actually use, the physical reveals had more than twice the impact of the basic digital reveals. What looks like a difference of only a point or two is actually a massive gulf.
All else being equal, you should always be trying to pull your reveal into the real world because the potential gains are enormous.
Of course, all else is never really equal. Here, we were able to perform identical versions of the tricks regardless of whether the reveal was digital or physical. But that usually won’t be possible. We could only accomplish such a clean physical Lottery Prediction because we had a hidden printer and a secret assistant. That’s hardly an apples-to-apples comparison with a photo prediction you can perform impromptu with nothing but your phone.
There are Lottery Predictions you can perform more casually that still have a physical reveal, but the number-selection procedure isn’t as free. So then the question becomes, “Is it worth sacrificing the freedom of the number selection for a physical reveal?”
Before this testing, I think I would have said, “Go with the free selections and the digital reveal.” But after seeing how much greater the impact was with the physical ticket, the choice no longer seems nearly as obvious. I’m now far more willing to sacrifice some freedom—or accept a more convoluted selection procedure—to get that prediction into their hands.
