Psychologists are interested in the psychological principles of magic because they have been experimenting informally for centuries and have built up a vast arsenal of techniques (many of which involve the use of psychology) to create the effect of "being deceived" by the audience. Tricks are generally achieved by manipulating people's supposed "facts", misleading their attention, and subtly influencing them to draw false conclusions—all of these things that have aroused the interest of psychologists.

While the physical techniques of misleading, hallucinating, and "force" viewers to believe illusions in magic shows are well known, little is known about the psychological techniques that correspond to them. Here are three psychological techniques that are commonly used by various types of magicians, and that psychologists are just beginning to experiment.

Psychic guidance, physical channeling, is a well-known technique used by magicians: the magician points to an object, uses an exaggerated gesture to divert attention, and the viewer's gaze is finally fixed on a pigeon that suddenly appears. Each step of the trick has been carefully designed in advance to ensure the success of the performance.

The psychology of guiding the audience is more subtle – leading the audience to the wrong conclusion is a good example. In this example, the magician directs the psyche of the people to believe that they see how the trick changes. When people believe that they have come to the "right conclusion", they do not pay too much attention to the ins and outs of the trick. On the contrary, people will look for evidence on their own that better substantiates their "theories". When the magician finally shows that this is not the case, the audience will find it even more interesting. Therefore, guiding the viewer's psychology in the wrong direction is not a happy coincidence, but a disturbance to the correct answer.

Research into people's problem-solving patterns shows that once people have an answer in mind, it's hard to think about another solution. Another situation similar to this effect is that if we want to recall the name of an actor, there is always a wrong answer that lingers in our minds. We know that his name is not "Christine. Bell", but still can't remember what his real name is.

Recently at the University of York, Gustav. Dr. Kuhn and his colleagues used the trick of "turning the ball into nothing" to demonstrate a very simple example of misleading people's minds. In this example, the magician throws a ball into the air three times, but the third time, the ball is gone. Dr. Kuhn, as a trainee magician, demonstrates this trick in the following video.

In fact, the third time he tossed the ball, the magician hid it in his palm, but he still looked upwards as if waiting for the ball to fly. The audience will also continue to look upwards along with his hints.

Dr. Kuhn's research found that the magician's mental cues of pretending to continue looking up played a huge role in the success of the trick. About two-thirds of the audience said they did see the ball flying upwards when the Magic looked up. However, in another case, when the magician did not look up, but continued to stare at his palm, only a third of the audience thought they saw the ball fly up.

In previous magic shows, elephants, airplanes, or major ground landmarks were transformed into illusions by using props: magicians used smoke and mirrors or other hardware props. But the magician also uses mental illusions to fool us and lead us to misjudge the outcome.

Studies have shown that it takes one-tenth of a second for external information to reach the brain and be perceived. It seems extremely boring to always live in the past before "tenths of a second", so we circumvent this delay by seeming to "predict the present". Even before we fully process external stimuli, our brains are trying to decipher what is happening in the "future" – that is, "now".

This function of our brains to automatically predict the future is often exploited by magicians to play tricks on us. The most common example is when a coin is apparently transferred from one hand to another, and it is lost. In fact, it is hidden in the palm of your hand. Because our consciousness has a "pre-emptive" - that is, assuming that the coin has been transferred to another hand, then when this hand is opened empty, the coin appears to disappear.

Cognitive hallucinations can also be achieved by mastering our attention. When attention is directed in other directions, we can miss a surprising number of details. Simmons studied a classic case in which many people were unaware of a person walking past them in a gorilla costume (see: Selective Blind Spots). Another magician/psychologist, Richard. Professor Weisman succinctly fabricates and demonstrates this effect – see the video below. It may seem like a boring trick at first, but stick to the halfway point and it gets fun.

Psychologists are beginning to explore why we are so careless and fail to see even such obvious details. There is a theory that it depends mainly on what we are looking at at at the time. To test this, Dr. Kuhn and his colleagues conducted a study using eye-tracking technology to plot exactly what subjects would look at when they watched magic.

They concluded that magic was successful not because our eyes weren't looking in the right direction, but because our attention was being directed elsewhere. Psychologists are surprised to find that there is no correlation between where we are looking and where our attention is. In this study, even if the subjects were intently looking at the magician's trick, they often couldn't see the magician's "trick" because their attention was directed elsewhere. It seems that what you can see is less important than where you pay attention.

The simplest physical coercion technique involves asking a spectator to pick one of a specially made poker hand of 52 spade pins. Obviously, the pick out is definitely the tip of spades. But magicians feel that this is not perfect, and they are more willing to use psychological compulsion techniques to create an effect.

A more subtle form of psychological compulsion involves giving a spectator the impression that he can choose one of the 52 cards and suits, when in fact the magician uses a trick to show the spectator all cards with the tip of spades, thus influencing his thinking and conclusions.

Ran forced the viewer to answer quickly, while emphasizing that he was free to choose. Of course, there is practically no room for free choice at all. Professor Richard shows this, but with a different ending:

That's why magicians spend a lot of time repeatedly emphasizing to the audience how free they are to choose. The magician hints at the viewer and tries to effectively rewrite the viewer's vague, stressed memories to make them think that their choice is entirely of their own volition.

It turns out that magicians do better than psychologists in terms of psychological compulsions, which produce mediocre results under experimental conditions. Psychologists are just getting started with magician's skills in the lab, and, obviously, they have more to learn.