The TIT

This is Part Two of of last week's Dear Jerxy post. In that post, I wrote about The Unmoved, a group of people who just don't react to magic in a way that makes performing for them satisfying. That's not to say you need your audience to lick your balls after every performance—I know a number of people who enjoy magic immensely but their reactions are low-key and subtle. The Unmoved aren't just quiet reactors, they are people who hang onto non-explanations as a way of not engaging with the effect. They're fooled by the tricks, but instead of letting the experience of the trick affect them and reacting positively, they say things like, "You must have done something," "Magicians have some way of doing that," "It was just a trick." These statements are an odd combination of "true" and "immensely stupid."

In last week's post I mentioned that because of my style of performing and attitude, I don't really have to deal with this type of spectator much. 

But here's something that does happen to me from time to time. I'll have someone who does enjoy the tricks I'm showing them. They're reacting appropriately and having no problem embracing the mystery. They're fully engaged. Then I do a trick that I know is a really strong trick with a good presentation and it gets a minimal or muted reaction. 

I can't blame the audience because they have a history of being a "good" spectator. 

So it must be the material, yes? It's must not be a good trick. But that's not the issue either, because it tends to happen with some of the strongest tricks I know. 

I think this is possibly the issue that "Hopeless in Halifax" was dealing with too, because the two tricks he mentioned ("Dear Penthouse Forum" by me, and "Amaze" by Seth Raphael) are two very strong tricks. I've received killer reactions with both.

Ah... but that may also be the problem.

You see, I'm not a big believer in the Too Perfect Theory. In 100s of hours testing magic effects and 1000s of hours performing, I've never seen a response to an effect that suggested, "The weakness of this trick is that it's too perfect." That seems like a concern borne out of magic theorizing, not actual performing.

However, I am a believer in The TIT. 

The TIT is the Too Inconceivable Theory.

The Too Inconceivable Theory suggests that there are some tricks where the impossibility of the effect is just too vast for some people to wrap their mind around and, in response, they just sort of shut down when presented with that kind of trick. 

The first thing about this we need to keep in mind is: There is not a perfect correlation between impossibility and the amazement/reaction of your spectator. In fact, sometimes they're not correlated at all.

A Thought Experiment.

I have to admit, I haven't done this for real yet (that's what makes it a thought experiment—if someone want's to put up the funding to test this, I'd be happy to) but I'm pretty confident in what the results would be.

Imagine two tricks.

Trick #1 - I bring out a sheet of paper that has a grocery list of 20 items on it. I also bring out a paper bag with something in it. I ask someone to name one of the items. They do, and I open up the paper bag to reveal that item.

Trick #2 - I bring out a sheet of paper that has a grocery list of 20 items on it. I also bring out twenty coupons for each item on the list. I ask someone to mix up the coupons and then deal them out in a row. When they do it's found that they've arranged the coupons in the exact order the items are on the list.

Which do you think gets a stronger reaction? I would guess it's probably the first one. Or at least they'd be very close. 

But how can this be when the first trick is a 1 in 20 occurrence and the second trick is a 1 in 2.5 quintillion occurrence (2,432,902,008,176,640,000, to be precise)?

Because, as I said, reactions are not always correlated to impossibility. 

An Actual Experiment

Here's something we did once in our focus group testing about two years ago. It wasn't the main focus of our testing and we only did it to either 20 (or maybe 24) people. And, in truth, the findings weren't statistically significant. But in this case the lack of statistically significant findings is what made it interesting. 

A Rubik's cube matching effect was the trick. We performed it for half the people using typical patter of "43 quintillion different combinations" etc. etc. Then we performed it for the other half of the people with patter that said, "There are almost 1000 different combinations that the cube can be arranged in." At the end, the spectators rated the tricks on how "amazing or impossible" they seemed and both versions scored the same. (Actually, on a scale of 1 to 10, the one where we downplayed the impossibility averaged two decimal points higher than the other. I don't remember the raw numbers, and I don't have them in front of me, but it was something like 8.8 and 9.0. But the point is there was essentially no difference.)

So What Does It Mean?

This has been my experience...

Most people's reaction to an effect will be somewhat correlated to the impossibility of an effect to a point, and then it plateaus.

For most people, you're not going to get much more mileage out of a one in billion chance than you would out of a one in a thousand chance.

But there is a certain percentage of the population, maybe 10%, where the reaction doesn't just plateau, it actually drops down significantly. When the impossibility of an effect becomes too great to conceive of, they just disengage. They can't appreciate the effect. And they'll resort to the non-explanations discussed above.

For them, the graph would look something like this.

I kind of think "amazement" can operate in the same way as pain for people. For the most part, the more pain we're in, the greater our reaction is. But for some people, when the pain gets too much, their body shuts down and doesn't process the pain. They go into shock and become numb to it. It's not a perfect analogy, but I think it's something similar.

An Analogy

If you're not understanding why this might be, think of it like this... Imagine you took someone to go mountain climbing. You stand at the foot of the mountain. "This mountain is 1000 times your size," you tell them.

"I feel so small!" they say. 

"If that makes you feel small," you say, "check this out." Then you show them a gif of the scale of the universe.

And you think, Well, they felt so dwarfed by the size of this mountain, they're definitely going to be totally blown away by this gif.

And instead they're like, "Oh yeah. Neat."

Why aren't they significantly more moved by this gif which shows the reality of how cosmically small they are than they were by this mountain which is something they could climb in an afternoon?

Because, the mountain is real and present and tangible. The scale of the universe, on the other hand, is inconceivable. 

Similarly, choosing one out of 20 postcards feels like a real, tangible choice. Shuffled decks and mixed-up Rubik's cubes may have possibilities in the quintillions or more, but that's all theoretical. So it doesn't feel like a choice amongst distinctly different elements that you can truly conceive of.

How to Handle This

An effect I used to perform a lot was Paul Harris' Bat Fishing where eight cards from a shuffled deck match the serial number on a borrowed bill. I didn't use the same method as he does in Art of Astonishment, but it was the same effect. Most of the time, this was a total mind-fuck. But then there was that 1 in 10 time where they wouldn't seem to process it. 

So how would I win them back? 

I would go into an effect that was an outright impossibility. What do I mean by that? I mean something that is impossible as opposed to just wildly unlikely. A matching shuffled deck effect is a one in a shit-tonillion chance, but a color changing deck is something that is a complete impossibility. You want to go with the complete impossibility.

Why would they react better to a complete impossibility if a one in a billion effect is too much to handle? Because this isn't the Too Impossible Theory, it's the Too Inconceivable Theory. People don't have a problem conceiving of a 1 in 100 shot. And people have no problem conceiving something being impossible.  In my experience, it's when something is in that grey area between "improbable" and "completely impossible" that I think some people's reactions can falter because they don't have a full grasp on the nature of the impossibility. 

In Summary

So, let me bring it back to Hopeless' question from last week where he asks:

Regarding "you're a magician you can make me do anything," is this a barrier you've experienced or had any luck breaking down?

To summarize my two posts about this...

• A muted reaction of "Well, I guess you're a magician and you can make me do anything," suggests they were fooled but not moved by the trick.
• If you know your presentation is strong (based on other performances) then it's likely that type of response is a form of a Non-Explanation, which is a default way some people will dismiss a trick rather than engage with the mystery.
• If you find they respond to all tricks that way, then you've have found someone who is not comfortable with the unknown and they will likely never be a good audience for your magic. 
• On the other hand, If you find they enjoy some tricks but resort to a non-explanation/become Unmoved with vast improbabilities, it's possible that they check out when confronted with things that are too inconceivable. Stick with effects that are more immediately comprehensible: either pure impossibilities or more conceivable improbabilities.