There is a study about bathroom stalls that I cannot get out of my head.
Researchers tracked usage patterns across public restrooms with multiple stalls and found a clear, consistent preference for stalls in the middle of the row. Not the first stall, which you might expect based on convenience. Not the last stall, which you might expect based on some notion of privacy. The middle. People walk past available stalls at either end and gravitate toward the center.
They do not know they are doing this. If you asked them why they chose that particular stall, they would give you a reason — “it looked cleaner,” “it was closest,” “I just walked there” — but the actual driver of their behavior is a spatial bias so deeply embedded in human cognition that it operates completely below conscious awareness.
This is called center-stage bias, and when I first encountered the research on it, I was sitting in a hotel room in Innsbruck reading about decision-making psychology for a consulting project. The application to magic performance was so immediate and so obvious that I put the consulting materials aside and spent the next three hours thinking about every physical choice I had ever presented to a spectator.
The work of Gustav Kuhn and Alice Pailhes on the psychology of forcing references spatial biases as one of several factors that influence spectator choices, and the broader behavioral science literature on position effects is extensive and remarkably consistent.
Center-Stage Bias
The technical term for the tendency to choose items from the center of an array is center-stage bias, sometimes called the center-position effect. It has been documented across a wide range of choice contexts.
In consumer research, products placed in the center of a shelf display are chosen significantly more often than identical products placed at the edges. In game shows, contestants selecting from a row of options show a marked preference for central positions. In political elections, candidates whose names appear in the middle of a ballot get measurably more votes than those at the top or bottom.
The effect is robust. It holds across different types of decisions, different numbers of options, and different populations. It is not enormous in absolute terms — it does not dominate all other factors — but it is consistent and statistically reliable.
What makes center-stage bias particularly interesting is that people are completely unaware of it. When asked to explain their choice, they never say “I chose it because it was in the middle.” They construct post-hoc explanations that have nothing to do with position. They believe their choice was based on the properties of the item itself — its quality, its appearance, its appeal — when in reality, the item’s position was a significant factor.
Why the Middle?
Several theories explain center-stage bias, and they are not mutually exclusive.
The first is the visual attention hypothesis. When scanning an array of options, our eyes tend to start in the center and spend more time there. Items in the center receive more visual attention, which means they are processed more deeply, which makes them more familiar, which makes them easier to choose. The path from “looked at longest” to “chosen most” is short and well-documented.
The second is the association hypothesis. In many cultures, the center position is associated with importance, prominence, and desirability. The lead singer stands in the center. The CEO sits at the center of the table. The most important painting hangs in the center of the wall. These cultural associations create an implicit expectation that the center item is somehow “better” or more significant, even when it is identical to the items around it.
The third is the compromise hypothesis, which comes from consumer psychology. When facing a range of options, people tend to avoid extremes and gravitate toward the middle as a “safe” compromise. This is related to loss aversion — the fear that an extreme choice might be wrong — and the heuristic that the middle represents balance and moderation.
All three mechanisms likely operate simultaneously, which explains why center-stage bias is so robust. Multiple independent psychological processes all push in the same direction: toward the center.
The First and Last Effect
Position bias is not limited to the center. There are also strong effects at the beginning and end of a sequence — what psychologists call the primacy effect and the recency effect.
Items presented first in a sequence benefit from primacy: they receive more attention, are processed more thoroughly, and are better remembered because they face no competition for working memory. Items presented last benefit from recency: they are freshest in memory, most recently processed, and most easily retrieved.
Items in the middle of a sequence — not the spatial middle, but the temporal middle — suffer. They are neither the first thing you noticed nor the last thing you remember. They fall into a psychological no-man’s-land that the research literature calls the “serial position effect.”
This creates an interesting tension with center-stage bias. In a spatial display (items laid out left to right), the center benefits. In a temporal sequence (items presented one after another), the first and last positions benefit while the center suffers. Whether center-stage bias or serial position effects dominate depends on whether the spectator is viewing all options simultaneously (spatial) or processing them sequentially (temporal).
I find this distinction endlessly useful when thinking about how choices are structured in performance. A fan of cards held open for selection is primarily a spatial display — center-stage bias applies. A sequence of items presented one at a time is primarily temporal — serial position effects apply. The same psychological principles produce different predictions depending on how the options are physically arranged.
My Own Discovery
I stumbled onto position effects in my own performances before I had the language to describe them.
In my early days performing close-up magic at networking events — this was before I understood any of the psychology — I noticed an inconsistent pattern. Sometimes when I spread a row of items on the table, the spectator would pick from the center. Other times, they would pick from the edges. I could not figure out what was driving the inconsistency.
Then, at a private event in Salzburg, I had a small breakthrough. I was performing at a cocktail reception and I noticed that spectators who were standing directly in front of the display tended to choose from the center, while spectators who were standing slightly to one side tended to choose items closest to them — which could be an edge item.
This made intuitive sense once I thought about it. Center-stage bias is driven partly by visual attention, and visual attention is anchored to the center of your visual field. If you are standing directly in front of a display, the center of the display is the center of your visual field. But if you are standing to one side, the center of your visual field corresponds to a different part of the display.
I started paying attention to where spectators were physically positioned relative to any array of options I presented. And I started being more deliberate about my own positioning — standing so that the spectator faced the display head-on, with the center of the display aligned with the center of their visual field.
This is not a technique. It is not a method. It is spatial awareness — understanding that where a person stands influences what they see, which influences what they choose.
The Touch Factor
There is another dimension of position bias that I find fascinating: the role of physical proximity and touch.
Research shows that people prefer items they can reach easily over items that require stretching or adjusting their position. This is another form of friction from the choice architecture framework. An item within easy reach has less friction than an item at the far edge of the display. Less friction means more likely to be chosen.
In close-up performance, this means that the physical layout of options is doing psychological work. Items closer to the spectator’s dominant hand, items at a comfortable reaching distance, items that do not require the spectator to lean or stretch — all of these are slightly more likely to be chosen than items that require more physical effort.
Again, the effect size is not overwhelming. It is one factor among many. But it is consistent, it is unconscious, and it stacks with other biases. Center position plus easy reach plus visual prominence creates a convergent pressure that makes one option significantly more attractive than its neighbors.
The Shelf Display Lesson
There is a story from my consulting work that illustrates how powerfully position effects operate in the real world.
I was working with a consumer goods company in Vienna on their retail strategy. They were trying to understand why certain products sold dramatically better than others despite having identical pricing, packaging, and advertising. We analyzed the data and found that shelf position was one of the strongest predictors of sales. Products at eye level outsold products on the bottom shelf by a factor of three or more. Products in the center of the shelf outsold products at the edges.
The retail industry has known this for decades — that is why premium brands pay for eye-level, center-shelf placement. But the magnitude of the effect still surprised our client. They had assumed that product quality and brand recognition were the primary drivers of sales. Position effects did not even make their initial list of hypotheses.
I remember sitting in the meeting room after we presented the findings and thinking about the parallel to performance. Retailers design their shelves to exploit position bias. Governments design their forms to exploit default effects. Cafeteria managers place healthy food at eye level. These are all examples of choice architecture — designing the physical environment to influence decisions without restricting options.
Performers face the same design challenge. The physical arrangement of options during a spectator’s choice is a form of choice architecture, and the same position biases that drive consumer behavior drive spectator behavior.
Combining Position with Other Biases
What makes position effects so powerful in practice is not their strength in isolation but their ability to combine with other psychological biases.
Center-stage bias plus conversational priming: you prime a concept through conversation, and then present a set of options where the primed option happens to be in the center. The two biases stack, and the probability of the target choice increases beyond what either bias would produce alone.
Position bias plus social proof: the first spectator at a table chooses from the center. The second spectator observes this and, influenced by social proof, makes a similar choice. The spatial bias and the social bias reinforce each other.
Position bias plus visual saliency: one item in the display is slightly more visually prominent than the others — a different orientation, a brighter color, a larger size — and it happens to be in the center. The visual attention bias and the center-stage bias converge.
I think about these combinations constantly. Not in the moment of performance — in the moment, everything needs to feel natural and spontaneous. But in the design phase, when I am sitting in a hotel room planning how to structure an effect, these combinations are part of my thinking. Where will the spectator be standing? What will be at eye level? What will be in the center of their visual field? What will be easiest to reach?
These are not questions about technique. They are questions about architecture. And the answers shape outcomes in ways that no spectator would ever suspect.
The Unconscious Nature of It
What I find most remarkable about position effects is not their existence but their invisibility. People genuinely do not know that position influences their choices. And even when you tell them — even when you explain center-stage bias and show them the data — they still cannot feel it operating in real time.
I have tested this informally with friends and colleagues. After explaining position bias, I would lay out an array of objects and ask them to choose one. They would consciously try to avoid the center. And they would succeed — briefly. But in subsequent, unannounced trials, when their guard was down and they were not thinking about bias, they would drift right back to the center.
This is because position bias operates at the level of visual attention and automatic preference formation — both System 1 processes. Knowing about the bias gives System 2 a tool to override it, but System 2 can only override it when it remembers to try. As soon as System 2 is distracted or relaxed, System 1 resumes control, and the bias returns.
This is a general principle of cognitive biases, and it applies to all the biases we have discussed in this series. Awareness provides a temporary override, not a permanent cure. The biases are too deeply embedded in the architecture of human cognition to be eliminated by knowledge alone.
For performers, this means that educated, sophisticated, bias-aware spectators are still susceptible to these effects. Not as susceptible as completely naive spectators, but far more susceptible than they believe. The gap between how immune people think they are and how immune they actually are is one of the most reliable features of human psychology.
From Bathroom Stalls to Performance
The bathroom stall study is absurd and amusing, which is why I remember it. But the principle it illustrates is serious and far-reaching. Position influences choice. The center gets chosen more. The first and last positions in a sequence have advantages. Physical proximity matters. These are not quirks of bathroom behavior. They are fundamental features of how human beings evaluate and select from arrays of options.
Understanding this changed my approach not to specific techniques — I am not going to discuss those — but to the overall design of choice moments in my performances. The physical layout, the spatial relationship between the spectator and the options, the alignment of the display with the spectator’s visual field — all of these are design elements that I now consider as carefully as any other aspect of the performance.
The spectator stands in front of the display. The center catches their eye. Their hand moves toward the middle. They choose. And they believe, completely and sincerely, that the choice was theirs.
It was. And it was not. Both things are true. Just like the bathroom stall.