There is a moment in every magic performance that terrifies me more than a dropped prop, more than a missed cue, more than forgetting my script. It is the moment when I can see a spectator arrive at the right explanation.
You learn to recognize it. There is a particular expression — a slight narrowing of the eyes, a small nod, a relaxation of the shoulders. It is the look of someone who believes they have figured out how you did it. And when that look appears, the magic dies. Not the trick — the trick may continue. But the magic, the experience of impossibility, evaporates. What remains is a puzzle, and the spectator is no longer your audience. They are your adversary.
But here is what took me years to understand: that same expression — the narrowing eyes, the small nod, the shoulder relaxation — looks identical whether the spectator has found the right explanation or the wrong one.
And that is the foundation of reasoning misdirection.
The Third Category of Misdirection
In the taxonomy of misdirection that Gustav Kuhn and Alice Pailhes developed at the MAGIC-lab at Goldsmiths, reasoning misdirection is the third major category, alongside perceptual misdirection and memory misdirection. And in many ways, it is the most sophisticated.
Perceptual misdirection prevents the spectator from seeing the method. Memory misdirection prevents the spectator from remembering the method. But reasoning misdirection does something more subtle and more powerful: it allows the spectator to see and remember the evidence, but prevents them from drawing the correct conclusion.
The spectator watches. The spectator remembers. And the spectator arrives at an explanation. But the explanation is wrong. And because they have arrived at an explanation, they stop searching.
This is not about distraction. This is about satisfaction. The human brain has a powerful drive to make sense of what it observes. When something impossible appears to happen, the brain begins searching for a causal explanation. It examines the evidence, considers possibilities, and tests theories against what it observed. This search process generates cognitive tension — the uncomfortable feeling of not understanding.
When the brain finds an explanation that fits the evidence — even one that is wrong — that tension resolves. The brain experiences what psychologists call cognitive closure. The search stops. The spectator relaxes. And from that moment forward, the correct explanation is essentially unreachable, because the spectator is no longer looking for it.
The Einstellung Effect
There is a name for this phenomenon in cognitive psychology: the Einstellung effect. It was first described in the context of problem-solving research. When people find one solution to a problem, they become functionally blind to other solutions — even solutions that are simpler, more elegant, or more correct.
The classic demonstration involves water jar problems. Subjects are given a series of puzzles that can all be solved with the same complex formula. After solving several puzzles with this formula, they are given a puzzle that could be solved with a much simpler method. The vast majority of subjects continue using the complex formula. Many cannot see the simple solution at all, even when it is pointed out to them.
The Einstellung effect works because the brain is an efficiency machine. Finding a solution is cognitively expensive. Once a solution is found, the brain does not want to discard it and start the search over. It has invested resources in arriving at this answer, and abandoning it feels like waste. So the brain holds onto the first satisfactory explanation and filters all subsequent information through that lens.
In the context of magic, this means that a false explanation does not just temporarily distract the spectator. It permanently occupies the mental slot reserved for “how the trick works.” Once that slot is filled, incoming evidence that contradicts the false explanation is either ignored, rationalized, or reinterpreted to fit the existing theory.
Three Mechanisms of Reasoning Misdirection
The research identifies three distinct mechanisms through which reasoning misdirection operates.
The first is the ruse. A ruse provides a plausible alternative reason for a visible action. The spectator sees what you do but is misled about why you do it. Darwin Ortiz’s work on this concept is illuminating: he argues that the audience classifies actions as important or unimportant based on their perceived motivation. If an action appears to be motivated by an innocent purpose, the audience categorizes it as unimportant and moves on. The action was seen, it was understood (incorrectly), and it was dismissed. The ruse does not prevent observation. It prevents correct interpretation.
I think about ruses constantly in my performance design. Every visible action needs a reason, and that reason needs to be more interesting than the truth. When I adjust the position of a prop on the table, the audience needs to read that adjustment as tidying up or as preparation for the next phase — anything other than what it actually is. The ruse is not a distraction. It is a narrative explanation that satisfies the spectator’s why-question before the question fully forms.
The second mechanism is the false solution. This is more deliberate than a ruse. A false solution is a wrong explanation that the performer actively encourages the spectator to adopt. Juan Tamariz, the Spanish master magician, developed an entire theory around what he calls the “final false solution” — a technique where the performer leads the audience toward an incorrect explanation, allows them to feel the satisfaction of having figured it out, and then destroys even that explanation, leaving them with nothing.
The false solution exploits the Einstellung effect directly. By providing a satisfying wrong answer, the performer prevents the spectator from reaching the right one. The spectator’s cognitive search terminates. They believe they understand. And because they believe they understand, they stop being dangerous.
The third mechanism is the exploitation of wrong assumptions. This is the subtlest form. The spectator arrives at a false conclusion not because the performer actively misled them, but because their own default beliefs and expectations pointed them in the wrong direction. The performer simply does nothing to correct the error.
This is where Darwin Ortiz’s concept of the false frame of reference becomes relevant. When the spectator is asking the wrong question — when their entire mental model of what they are watching is built on an incorrect foundation — they will never arrive at the right answer no matter how carefully they analyze what they see. The false frame of reference is perhaps the most powerful form of reasoning misdirection because the spectator is doing all the work. They are fooling themselves.
Why I Find This Fascinating
I come from the world of strategy consulting. In that world, one of the most dangerous cognitive traps is what we call “anchoring” — the tendency for the first piece of information someone receives to disproportionately influence all subsequent thinking. If a client walks into a strategy session having already formed a hypothesis, that hypothesis will color every analysis, every data point, every conclusion that follows. Even if the hypothesis is wrong. Especially if the hypothesis is wrong.
In consulting, we spend significant effort designing processes that prevent premature anchoring. We deliberately withhold early conclusions. We structure workshops so that participants explore multiple possibilities before converging on a solution. We know that the first plausible theory is the most dangerous, because once it takes root, it is nearly impossible to uproot.
Magic does the opposite. Magic deliberately plants the anchor. Magic wants the spectator to converge on a false theory as quickly as possible, because that false theory is what protects the real method. The faster the spectator arrives at a wrong explanation, the safer the performer is.
This inversion fascinated me when I first recognized it. The same cognitive architecture that makes people poor strategic thinkers — the tendency to anchor on early hypotheses and filter subsequent evidence through them — is exactly what makes people wonderful magic audiences. The bug in human reasoning is the feature in magic.
Designing for Cognitive Satisfaction
Understanding reasoning misdirection has changed how I construct effects. I no longer think only about what the spectator sees and does not see. I also think about what the spectator thinks.
Specifically, I try to design performances that offer the spectator a plausible wrong explanation early in the routine. I want them to experience the satisfaction of believing they have figured something out. I want them to relax into their theory. And then, ideally, I want to continue the performance in a way that is consistent with their false theory — reinforcing it, making them more certain — until the climax reveals something that their theory cannot explain.
This creates a particular kind of astonishment that is different from the simple surprise of an unexpected outcome. It is the astonishment of someone whose entire framework for understanding what they watched has collapsed. They did not just fail to predict the ending. They failed to understand the beginning. Their whole model was wrong.
I find this kind of astonishment more profound and more lasting than the simpler kind. When someone says “I have no idea how you did that,” it can mean many things. But when someone says “I thought I knew, and I was completely wrong,” that is a deeper experience. It is the experience of having your own reasoning, your own intelligence, your own analytical process turned against you. And for most people, that is genuinely humbling in a way that creates wonder.
The Spectator’s Need to Explain
One thing I have noticed in my performances, particularly at corporate events where the audience tends to be analytically minded, is how strong the drive to explain is. These are people who solve problems for a living. When they encounter something they cannot explain, it creates genuine discomfort. They need an answer.
This need is not a problem. It is an opportunity. Because the strength of the drive to explain is exactly what makes reasoning misdirection so effective. The spectator is not passively waiting for an explanation to present itself. They are actively searching. They are testing theories. They are working hard.
And hard cognitive work is expensive. When the brain finally finds a solution, the relief is proportional to the effort invested. The harder the search, the more satisfying the resolution. And the more satisfying the resolution, the less likely the brain is to abandon that solution and start searching again.
This means that the most analytically minded audiences — the ones who seem like they should be the hardest to fool — are often the most susceptible to reasoning misdirection. Their analytical drive is stronger, which means they invest more in finding an explanation, which means their commitment to whatever explanation they find is correspondingly stronger.
I perform regularly for groups of engineers, data scientists, and management consultants. These are some of the most satisfying audiences I encounter. Not because they are easy to fool in general — they are sharp observers. But because once they have formed a theory, they hold onto it with the tenacity of people who are accustomed to being right. Their confidence in their own reasoning is the very thing that makes reasoning misdirection work.
The Practical Test
Here is a test I apply to every effect in my repertoire, inspired by this understanding of reasoning misdirection: after performing for a test audience, I ask them not just whether they were fooled, but what their theory was. What did they think happened? What explanation did they arrive at?
If their theory is close to the truth, the effect needs redesign. If they have no theory at all, the effect might benefit from providing a false one. But if they have a theory that is confidently held and completely wrong — that is the sweet spot. That is an effect where reasoning misdirection is operating at full power.
The best effects, I have found, are the ones where the spectator leaves with a theory they believe in. Not because the effect failed to be mysterious — but because the mystery is operating at a level they do not even know exists. They think they understand it. They are wrong. And they will never discover they are wrong, because they have stopped looking.
That is the power of cognitive satisfaction. The brain found its answer. The search is over. The real method is safe — not because it was invisible, not because it was forgotten, but because a better explanation already occupies the space where the truth would need to live.