You Are Not So Smart – Episode 334: Magical Thinking with Matt Tompkins (Rebroadcast)

Podcast: You Are Not So Smart
Host: David McRaney
Guest: Dr. Matt Tompkins, psychologist and magician
Date: March 2, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode explores the psychology behind magical thinking—our human tendency to believe in the supernatural, from Clever Hans to spiritualism, psychics, mind-reading machines, and neuroscience-stage magic. Host David McRaney is joined by Dr. Matt Tompkins, experimental psychologist, magician, and author of The Spectacle of Illusion, to discuss why magical thinking persists, how magicians exploit it, historical moments when science and magic overlapped, and what that tells us about human perception, memory, and self-deception.

Key Topics and Insights

The Story of Clever Hans and the Ideomotor Effect

(00:20–25:51)

• Clever Hans: In the late 1800s, Wilhelm von Osten exhibited a horse that appeared to read, spell, tell time, and perform arithmetic. This amazed crowds and even made international news.

• Scientific Investigation: The German Board of Education formed a commission led by psychologist Carl Stumpf and researcher Oskar Pfungst. Through experiments using double-blind protocols (blindfolds, alternate questioners), they discovered Hans could only answer correctly if the questioner knew the answer and unwittingly provided subtle cues.

• The Ideomotor Effect: Hans’s apparent intelligence was actually due to humans’ unconscious, involuntary muscle movements—something also seen with Ouija boards, dowsing rods, and seances.

• Significance: This revelation led to the establishment of double-blind testing in psychology and exposed the power of self-deception—even honest, intelligent people can unwittingly fool themselves and others.

  "Even intelligent, honest people can unknowingly deceive themselves and others—a lesson that remains deeply relevant today."
  —David McRaney (24:45)

Magical Thinking: Enduring and Evolving

(25:51–30:29)

• Despite advances in science and technology, magical thinking does not disappear—it persists and adapts to new media and cultural shifts.

• Matt Tompkins notes that the recurring fear or surprise about the "return" of magical beliefs is itself a cyclical phenomenon throughout history.

  "Anytime you get any kind of shift in a media landscape, people adapt into it... you get these same very or at least very similar patterns of cons, deception, and self-deception."
  —Matt Tompkins (27:50)

  "How easy it feels like it ought to be to debunk this stuff is very clearly an illusion..."
  —David McRaney (25:51)

Meet Matt Tompkins: Studying the Intersection of Magic, Psychology, and Technology

(35:55–42:48)

• Matt Tompkins’s Work: As a postdoc at Lund University, he designs “fake mind control devices” to study how people perceive emerging technologies, mind reading, and the credibility of claims around AI and neurotech.

• Methods: Tompkins and his team convince people that fictional tech can read their thoughts or predict their actions, then study their reactions—even after being explicitly told the tech is fake.

• Implication: Our brains can generate convincing experiences of the impossible, and introspection cannot always reveal the illusion; only scientific controls can.

  "I work in the Choice Blindness Lab... my role is to design and implement fake mind control technologies for the Swedish government. Effectively, yes."
  —Matt Tompkins (36:13)

  "You need controls in order to look at what's mechanistically happening."
  —Matt Tompkins (39:55)

The Science of Magic: From Card Tricks to NeuroMagic

(42:48–47:07)

• Many scientists, including Tompkins, trace their interest in psychology to childhood fascination with magic tricks. For Tompkins, it started with coin magic.

• The book Sleights of Mind is credited with founding the field of NeuroMagic—using magic tricks to understand brain processes related to perception and cognition.

  "That was my starter thing. It was seeing a coin trick at a county fair... then I got that book [JB Bobo's Coin Magic]... and then my brother and I actually did a... Penn and Teller-inspired double birthday act."
  —Matt Tompkins (41:30)

The Science of Magic Association (SOMA)

(43:27–47:07)

• SOMA is an organization Tompkins co-founded to bring together magicians and cognitive scientists; they collaborate on conferences and research.

• The aim: Magicians contribute expertise in illusion and misdirection, advancing psychological research, while scientists give magicians deeper insight into perception and cognition.

• There is a growing, but still niche, community at this intersection, including magicians-turned-psychologists like Gustav Kuhn and Tony Barnhart.

  "...the idea is to bring together performers, people in the magic performance community, with researchers to work on collaboration..."
  —Matt Tompkins (44:52)

Experimental Research: Creating Hallucinations and False Memories with Magic

(47:07–53:07)

• Tompkins’s research includes experiments where participants “see” coins disappear in a pantomimed trick, even when there was never a coin at all.

• About 30% of people confidently report seeing a vanished coin that never existed; some supply vivid false details.

• The study provides insight into false memory formation and how easy it is to implant or elicit strong perceptions and mistaken testimony.

  "We had about 30% of people that would swear confidently that there was something that the magician had made disappear..."
  —Matt Tompkins (47:46)

History: Magicians as the First Skeptics

(53:07–65:14)

• Spiritualism and Empirical Religion: In the late 1800s, the rise of spiritualism (mediums, seances, talking to the dead) inspired waves of scientific and magical investigation.

• Society for Psychical Research (SPR): Early scholars and magicians designed tests and fake seances to gather and analyze eyewitness reports, uncovering frequent illusion and memory errors—even among honest, well-meaning people.

• Cold Reading and Self-Deception: Tompkins describes attending spiritualist churches, noting most practitioners sincerely believe in their purported abilities—self-deception can run deeper than malice or outright fraud.

• Techniques like the “Blank Seance” persist to this day, showing how psychological dynamics protect magical beliefs even after exposure or debunking.

  "So the earliest examples you can see... of people trying to integrate sort of magic methods into behavioral research methods... goes back to the late 1800s..."
  —Matt Tompkins (54:07)

  "One of the arguments was, there's so many of these people making all of these kind of corresponding claims. Surely not all of them are either fraudulent or delusional..."
  —Matt Tompkins (56:55)

  "Cold reading... is a technique by which you give the illusion of knowing specific details about a person without any prior knowledge..."
  —David McRaney (65:14)

Magical Thinking: Evolutionary Roots and Cognitive Baggage

(72:06–end)

• Magical thinking—superstition, belief in luck, rituals, paranormal explanations—is a cognitive byproduct of the human drive to impose order and agency on our environment.

• Often, magical thinking arises from evolutionary adaptiveness: a bias toward false positives (seeing agency where there is none) carried little cost, but missing a real agent (false negative) could mean death.

• Today, these tendencies are relics—exploited by stage magicians, con artists, and occasionally by well-intentioned individuals engaging in self-deception.

• The scientific method and skepticism are our bulwarks against these in-built illusions, though vulnerability persists.

  "Magical thinking... is most likely a relic of our evolutionary past, a vestige of the early hominid brain struggling to detect and impose order on a chaotic world..."
  —David McRaney (72:06)

  "Self deception is the most potent kind of deception there is."
  —David McRaney (closing remarks)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Magical Thinking’s Persistence:

  “This idea that we're past it, and oh no, it's back again— that is a recurring motif for every couple of years.”
  —Matt Tompkins (27:50)

• On the Limits of Introspection:

  “There's no level of introspection that's going to give you... that's going to unlock what's happening. This requires scientific investigation.”
  —David McRaney (39:48)

• On Scientists and Magicians Collaborating:

  “You want to go to Las Vegas and go to a convention full of magicians doing whatever they're going to be doing. That sounds great. It sounds awesome. Thank you for inventing this thing.”
  —David McRaney (43:39)

• On the Alliance of Magic and Science:

  "Magicians tend to know that they're exploiting certain things that they may not know there are words for them in the psychological literature... psychologists... love seeing a historical example of something like this..."
  —David McRaney (53:07)

Timestamps for Significant Segments

• 00:20–05:19 — The story of Clever Hans.
• 05:19–25:51 — The ideomotor effect, self-deception, and debunking magical feats.
• 25:51–30:29 — Tompkins on the resilience of magical thinking.
• 35:55–39:29 — Tompkins describes his research at Lund University.
• 39:29–42:48 — Magic as a gateway to psychology; NeuroMagic.
• 43:27–47:07 — The Science of Magic Association.
• 47:07–53:07 — Experimental coin trick research on false memory and perception.
• 54:07–65:14 — History: spiritualism, magicians as skeptical investigators, and the birth of scientific debunking.
• 72:06–end — Evolutionary context of magical thinking and why skepticism is necessary.

Summary

This episode delves into how magical thinking arises from the intersection of psychology, evolution, and culture—revealing our minds as powerful, but fallible, meaning-makers vulnerable to illusion and self-deception. Through the intertwined histories of magicians and psychologists, the episode shows just how natural and persistent these mental tendencies are—and why ongoing skepticism, scientific control, and critical thinking are essential in a modern world still beset by new forms of magical belief.

Resources Mentioned:

• The Spectacle of Illusion by Matt Tompkins
• Sleights of Mind by Stephen Macnick and Susana Martinez-Conde
• Science of Magic Association (SOMA)
• The Society for Psychical Research
• The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan

For full references and Matt Tompkins’ book, check the show notes or the You Are Not So Smart website.