I was sitting in a hotel room in Graz after a corporate keynote when I had one of those moments where two completely separate worlds collided in my head.
I had been reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow — not for magic, but for my consulting work. As a strategy consultant, understanding decision-making biases was supposed to help me advise clients on everything from pricing strategy to organizational design. Kahneman’s core framework is elegantly simple: we have two systems of thinking. System 1 is fast, intuitive, automatic. System 2 is slow, deliberate, analytical. Most of our decisions are made by System 1, even when we believe System 2 is in charge.
I had read maybe a hundred pages when I put the book down and stared at the ceiling. Because I suddenly understood why certain things I did in my mentalism performances worked so reliably, and why other things failed unpredictably. The answer had nothing to do with technique. It had everything to do with which system of thinking my spectators were using when they made their choices.
That realization, which I later found confirmed in the research of Gustav Kuhn and Alice Pailhes at Goldsmiths University, fundamentally changed how I approach every interaction with a spectator.
The Two Systems
Here is the simplest way I can explain it.
System 1 is what answers when someone says “what is two plus two?” You do not calculate. You do not deliberate. The answer simply appears. System 1 handles pattern recognition, emotional responses, first impressions, and the vast majority of our daily decisions. It is incredibly fast, operates below conscious awareness, and relies heavily on shortcuts, associations, and default patterns.
System 2 is what engages when someone says “what is 347 times 28?” You have to stop. Focus. Calculate. System 2 handles complex reasoning, critical analysis, and careful evaluation. It is slow, effortful, and demanding. It requires concentration. And here is the critical detail: System 2 is lazy. It does not engage unless it has to. Given any opportunity to let System 1 handle the work, it will step aside and let the autopilot run.
The implications for magic — and specifically for any situation where a performer wants to influence a spectator’s choice — are enormous.
When a spectator is operating in System 1, their choices follow predictable patterns. They go with gut feelings, default options, familiar answers, and whatever comes to mind first. These choices feel completely free and voluntary to the spectator, because System 1 operates so smoothly that it never feels like a compromise. The spectator experiences a spontaneous, unforced decision. But from the outside, looking at the data across hundreds of spectators, these “free” choices cluster around a surprisingly narrow set of options.
When a spectator shifts into System 2, everything changes. They become analytical. They second-guess their initial impulse. They consider alternatives. They look for patterns. They become, in a word, unpredictable — because they are now genuinely deliberating rather than following cognitive defaults.
The Hotel Room Experiment
After that night in Graz, I started paying attention to which system my spectators seemed to be in during different moments of my performances.
The pattern was immediately obvious once I knew what to look for. At corporate events, during networking receptions, people are in a relaxed, social mode. They are chatting, drinking, enjoying themselves. System 1 is running the show. When I approach a table and start a conversation, the social context keeps them in System 1. They are not analyzing. They are engaging.
In that mode, when I ask someone to think of something — a number, a word, an image — their first instinct is to grab whatever comes to mind fastest. The path of least cognitive resistance. The default. And those defaults, across thousands of people, are remarkably consistent.
But I also noticed the opposite pattern. When something about my approach or my phrasing triggered analytical thinking — when I accidentally made someone feel like they were being tested, or when my instructions were too complicated, or when I paused too long before asking for a choice — the spectator would visibly shift. You could almost see System 2 switch on. Their eyes would narrow slightly. Their posture would change. They would think harder. And in that moment, the predictability evaporated.
I started testing this in my hotel room practice sessions. Not the techniques themselves — that is not what this is about — but the conversational pacing and framing that surrounded the moment of choice. I would record myself on my phone, play back the audio, and listen specifically for moments where my phrasing might accidentally trigger analytical thinking. Too many instructions. Too long a pause. Too much emphasis on the word “choose.” Anything that might wake up System 2.
Time Pressure and the Path of Least Resistance
One of the most powerful implications of the dual-process framework is the role of time pressure. System 2 needs time to engage. It is slow by definition. If you reduce the available time for a decision, you force the spectator to rely on System 1, which means they fall back on defaults and shortcuts.
This is not the same as rushing someone. There is a critical difference between creating gentle time pressure and making someone feel pressured. The first keeps System 1 in control. The second creates stress, which can actually trigger System 2 as a defensive response. The distinction matters enormously.
In practice, this looks like natural conversational momentum. You maintain a rhythm. You keep the energy flowing. When the moment of choice arrives, it arrives as part of that flow rather than as a stop-and-think moment. The spectator responds within the rhythm of the conversation, and System 1 handles the response.
I think about it like music. A good conversation has a tempo. If you maintain that tempo through the moment of choice, the choice becomes part of the melody. If you suddenly stop the music, point a spotlight at the spectator, and say “NOW CHOOSE,” you have broken the rhythm, created self-consciousness, and handed the decision to System 2.
The research backs this up. Under time pressure, people are dramatically more likely to go with their first impulse, their default option, or whatever is most cognitively accessible. Under no time pressure, they deliberate, consider alternatives, and their choices become harder to predict.
Cognitive Load: The Invisible Ally
Related to time pressure is cognitive load — the amount of mental processing the spectator is already doing when the moment of choice arrives.
System 2 has limited bandwidth. If it is already occupied with something — processing information, maintaining a conversation, thinking about an earlier moment in the performance — it has less capacity to engage with the choice. This means that the more mentally engaged the spectator is (in a positive, non-stressful way), the more likely System 1 is to handle the decision.
This insight transformed how I structure the moments leading up to a choice. I used to think of those moments as dead time — filler that happened between the interesting parts. Now I understand that the conversational and performative texture of those moments is doing essential psychological work. A story that engages the spectator’s imagination. A question that makes them think about something unrelated to the upcoming choice. A shared joke that creates social connection. All of these occupy System 2 with pleasant tasks, leaving System 1 to handle the choice when it arrives.
At a keynote in Linz last year, I was performing a mentalism piece and I noticed something fascinating. The spectator was a CFO, an analytical thinker by profession. Under normal circumstances, I would expect someone like that to engage System 2 heavily. But I had spent three minutes before the effect telling a story about pattern recognition in business strategy — something genuinely interesting to her professionally. Her System 2 was fully engaged with the ideas in the story. When the moment of choice came, buried naturally within the flow of the conversation, she went straight to her default. System 1 handled it without System 2 even noticing.
The Social Pressure Variable
Being in front of other people adds another layer. Social context activates System 1 in specific ways. When you are the center of attention — when everyone is watching you make a choice — your brain defaults to socially safe, familiar, conventional options. You do not want to look weird. You do not want to take too long. You do not want to be the person who holds up the show.
This social pressure, in small doses, is an ally. It keeps choices fast and conventional. The spectator grabs the first reasonable option that comes to mind, because the social cost of deliberating too long feels higher than the cost of choosing quickly.
But again, there is a threshold. Too much social pressure creates anxiety, and anxiety triggers System 2 as a protective mechanism. The spectator becomes self-conscious about being manipulated, starts overthinking, and deliberately avoids obvious choices. The art is in creating just enough social momentum to keep System 1 in the driver’s seat without tipping into anxiety.
I learned this the hard way at a corporate event in Salzburg. I was performing for a group of engineers — brilliant people, professionally trained to analyze everything. I made the mistake of framing a choice in a way that felt like a test. “Let’s see what your subconscious reveals,” I said, trying to be dramatic. The effect was immediate. Every person at the table shifted into System 2. They became deliberate, careful, analytical. They treated the choice like a puzzle to solve rather than a spontaneous moment. The predictability that I had been relying on vanished completely.
After that experience, I went back to my hotel room and spent two hours rethinking how I frame the moments of choice in my act. I stripped out every word that might trigger analytical thinking. Every phrase that implied a test, a challenge, or a puzzle. I replaced them with language that was casual, social, and low-stakes. “Just say the first thing that comes to mind.” “Whatever pops into your head.” “There is no wrong answer.” All of these phrases are invitations to stay in System 1.
The Familiarity Factor
There is one more dimension of System 1 that I find endlessly fascinating: familiarity. The more familiar a procedure feels, the more System 1 trusts it and the less System 2 intervenes.
This is why the structure of a choice matters as much as its content. When a spectator is asked to do something that feels like a normal, everyday action — picking a card, choosing a number, pointing at something — the familiarity of the action keeps System 1 in control. The spectator does not need to analyze the procedure because they have done similar things thousands of times.
But when a spectator is asked to do something unusual — something that does not map onto any familiar template — System 2 activates to figure out what is going on. The novelty of the procedure demands analysis, and once System 2 is analyzing the procedure, it is a short step to analyzing the choice itself.
This explained a pattern I had noticed in my early performances. Effects that used simple, familiar choice structures worked beautifully. Effects that required unusual or complicated choice procedures were inconsistent. Not because the methods were different in quality, but because the procedures themselves were triggering different thinking systems.
What This Means in Practice
Understanding the dual-process framework did not teach me any new techniques. What it taught me was something more valuable: the psychological context in which techniques succeed or fail.
It taught me that the moment of choice is not just about what the spectator chooses. It is about what state their mind is in when they choose. And that state is shaped by everything that comes before: the conversation, the pacing, the social dynamics, the framing, the familiarity of the procedure.
The technique is the mechanism. The psychology is the environment. And the environment determines whether the mechanism works.
I now think of every performance as a careful management of which thinking system is active at which moment. During the build-up and the story, I want System 2 engaged — because an engaged, thinking audience is an invested audience. But at the moment of choice, I want System 1 running the show — because an intuitive, spontaneous choice is a predictable choice.
The transition between those two states — the moment where you shift a spectator from engaged analytical thinking to spontaneous intuitive responding — is, I have come to believe, one of the most important skills a mentalist can develop. It is invisible to the audience. It does not look like anything. There is no move, no gesture, no technique. It is entirely about conversational rhythm, tonal shift, and psychological timing.
And it all comes back to a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist’s observation that we have two minds, and for most of our lives, the fast one is in charge.
That is what makes this work.