There is an experiment that I cannot stop thinking about. It involves a Ouija board, two participants, and a question that goes straight to the heart of what it means to choose.
In the experiment, two people sit across from each other with their fingers resting on a Ouija board planchette. They are told that the study is about ideomotor responses — the tiny, unconscious muscle movements that make the planchette appear to move on its own. Both participants believe they are moving the planchette together, in equal collaboration.
But one of the participants is a confederate. A plant. They are actually guiding the planchette to specific answers. The real participant, meanwhile, is contributing nothing to the movement — or at best, their contributions are overridden by the confederate’s deliberate guidance.
Here is the part that floored me: when asked afterward how much control they felt they had over the planchette’s movements, the real participants reported feeling significant personal agency. They believed they were contributing to the movement. They felt that their intentions were guiding the planchette. Some even reported feeling that they had more control than the other person.
They experienced authorship of actions they did not perform. They felt free will over outcomes they did not influence.
This is Daniel Wegner’s illusion of conscious will, and when I encountered it through the work of Gustav Kuhn and Alice Pailhes, who connect Wegner’s research to the psychology of forcing in magic, it reframed everything I thought I understood about the spectator’s experience during a performance.
The Authorship Problem
Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, spent decades studying how people determine whether they caused something to happen. His central finding is counterintuitive and unsettling: the feeling of having caused something is not a direct readout of actual causation. It is a conclusion — an inference — that the brain constructs based on certain cues.
The brain does not have direct access to the causal chain between intention and action. It cannot observe, from the inside, whether a given intention actually caused a given outcome. Instead, it uses a set of heuristics to make a judgment about causation. If the right cues are present, the brain concludes “I did that.” If the cues are absent, it concludes “that happened to me.”
The three critical cues are:
Priority: Did my intention come before the action? If I thought about moving my hand, and then my hand moved, the temporal sequence suggests causation. If the hand moved before I thought about moving it, the sequence suggests something else caused it.
Consistency: Does the action match my intention? If I intended to move my hand to the right and my hand moved to the right, the consistency supports the inference of causation. If I intended to move right and my hand moved left, something else must be responsible.
Exclusivity: Is there no other obvious cause? If my hand moved and nothing else could have caused the movement, I must have caused it. If there is a visible external cause (someone pushed my hand), I attribute the movement to that cause instead.
When all three cues are present — I intended something, the outcome matched my intention, and I cannot see any other cause — the brain concludes with high confidence that I caused the outcome. The feeling of free will, of conscious authorship, floods in.
But here is Wegner’s devastating insight: these cues can all be present even when I did not actually cause the outcome. If I happen to have an intention that matches an outcome that was actually caused by something else, and I cannot see that other cause, I will feel that I caused it. The feeling of causation is an illusion — a well-constructed, deeply convincing illusion, but an illusion nonetheless.
Why This Matters for Performance
I first connected Wegner’s research to my own experience during a late night in a hotel room in Graz. I had performed a mentalism effect earlier that evening at a corporate reception, and a spectator had told me afterward, with absolute conviction, that her choice had been completely free. “You couldn’t have known,” she said. “I chose that completely on my own.”
She was sincere. She was not being polite. She genuinely experienced her choice as free, autonomous, and unpredictable. And that experience of freedom was the foundation of the entire effect. Without it, the effect would have been meaningless. If she had felt guided, influenced, or restricted, the revelation would have produced irritation rather than wonder.
Sitting in that hotel room, reading Wegner, I understood why her experience of freedom was so robust. All three of Wegner’s cues were present in her situation.
Priority: she had formed an intention before making her choice. She thought about what she wanted, and then she chose it. The intention preceded the action.
Consistency: the outcome matched her intention. She intended to choose a particular thing, and that is what she chose. The match was perfect.
Exclusivity: she could not see any external cause for her choice. From her perspective, no one had guided her, restricted her, or influenced her. The only apparent cause of her choice was her own will.
All three cues aligned, and her brain drew the obvious conclusion: I chose freely. The inference was automatic, confident, and completely resistant to doubt. Even if someone had told her that her choice was influenced, she would have dismissed the claim — because the feeling of authorship was so strong and so consistent with her experience.
Ellen Langer and the Illusion of Control
Wegner’s work connects to an earlier research tradition started by Ellen Langer in 1975. Langer demonstrated what she called the illusion of control — the tendency for people to believe they can influence outcomes that are actually determined by chance.
In one of her classic experiments, Langer sold lottery tickets to office workers. Some participants were allowed to choose their own ticket; others were assigned a ticket randomly. Before the drawing, she offered to buy back the tickets. The participants who had chosen their own tickets demanded significantly higher prices than those who had been assigned tickets — even though the choice of ticket had absolutely no bearing on the probability of winning.
The act of choosing created a feeling of control, which inflated the perceived value of the ticket. Choosing, even when the choice is irrelevant to the outcome, makes people feel they have influenced the outcome.
This finding maps directly onto the performance context. When a spectator makes a choice during an effect — any choice, even one that has no influence on the outcome — the act of choosing creates a feeling of control. And that feeling of control is what makes the eventual impossible outcome so astonishing. “I chose freely, so how could you have known?”
The irony is exquisite. The very act of choosing — which the spectator experiences as the strongest evidence of their freedom — is what creates the conviction that makes the effect powerful. If they had not chosen — if the outcome had simply been revealed without their participation — the effect would be weaker. It is the spectator’s investment in their own choice, their feeling of authorship over the outcome, that supplies the psychological fuel for the eventual revelation.
Attribute Substitution Revisited
Wegner’s framework connects to the concept of attribute substitution that we will explore more deeply in an upcoming post, but it is worth previewing here.
When a spectator is asked to make a choice during a performance, the procedure is often unfamiliar. They may not have a clear mental model for what is happening. In Kahneman’s terms, they face a complex, ambiguous situation that they need to evaluate.
The brain’s response, via attribute substitution, is to replace the complex question (“am I really choosing freely in this unfamiliar procedure?”) with a simpler one (“did I intend this? does it match my intention?”). If the answer to the simpler question is yes, the brain concludes that the answer to the complex question is also yes. The substitution is seamless and undetectable.
This is why unfamiliar procedures do not raise suspicion as often as you might expect. The spectator does not analyze the procedure. They analyze their own feeling of agency. And the feeling of agency, as Wegner showed, is remarkably easy to satisfy. All you need is priority, consistency, and exclusivity — and in most performance contexts, all three are naturally present.
The Robustness of the Illusion
What strikes me most about the illusion of conscious will is not that it exists, but how resilient it is.
I have performed for audiences that included psychologists, neuroscientists, and behavioral economists — people who know about cognitive biases, who have read Kahneman and Wegner, who understand intellectually that the feeling of free will can be illusory. And even these expert audiences experience their choices as free. Even they report feeling that they chose spontaneously and without influence.
Knowing about the illusion does not break it. This is because the illusion operates at a level below intellectual knowledge. It is not a belief that can be corrected by information. It is a perceptual experience — like an optical illusion that persists even after you know it is an illusion. You can know that the two lines in the Muller-Lyer illusion are the same length, and they still look different. You can know that the feeling of free will might be illusory, and it still feels real.
At a keynote I delivered in Vienna last year, I discussed decision-making biases with a room of executives and then performed a mentalism effect. One executive — a woman who had been particularly engaged during the bias discussion — approached me afterward and said, “I know everything you just told us about how choices are influenced. I was watching for it. I was trying to resist it. And I still have no idea how you knew what I was thinking.”
She experienced the full illusion of free choice despite being actively primed to resist it. That is how deep this goes.
The Three-Repetition Experiment
There is a finding from the research on forcing that connects directly to Wegner’s framework and highlights just how robust the illusion of control can be.
Researchers tested a specific type of outcome-based selection procedure — one where the spectator makes a choice but the outcome is actually predetermined regardless of what they choose. They ran it three times in a row with the same participant. Three consecutive repetitions of the same procedure, each time arriving at the same predetermined outcome.
You might expect that by the third repetition, participants would realize something was off. The consistency of the outcome, combined with the unfamiliar procedure, should trigger suspicion. System 2 should wake up and start asking questions.
But the researchers found that participants felt the same degree of control over their choice on the third repetition as on the first. Three consecutive repetitions of a procedure that always arrived at the same outcome did not reduce the participants’ belief that their choices were free.
This finding stunned me when I first read it. The illusion of control is so powerful that even repeated identical outcomes do not break it. The spectator’s attribution machinery — “I intended, the outcome matched, I see no other cause” — continues to generate the feeling of free choice even in the face of evidence that should provoke suspicion.
The researchers attribute this robustness to what they call ambiguity blindness — the tendency to overlook small inconsistencies in a procedure when the overall experience feels coherent. This is related to the Moses Illusion: when asked “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?” most people answer “two” without noticing that it was Noah, not Moses, who built the ark. People naturally tolerate small distortions and inconsistencies without conscious detection.
What This Means for the Experience of Wonder
Understanding Wegner’s framework did not change what I do in performance. It changed how I understand what happens in the spectator’s mind during performance.
The experience of wonder in mentalism depends on a collision between two beliefs: “I chose freely” and “he knew what I would choose.” These two beliefs are incompatible. If the choice was free, it should have been unpredictable. If it was predicted, it could not have been free.
The feeling of wonder arises from this cognitive conflict — the same conflict that Kuhn and Pailhes describe as the core of the magical experience. And the illusion of conscious will is what makes the first belief (“I chose freely”) feel so unshakable. The spectator is not merely hoping they chose freely. They are experiencing a deep, automatic, neurologically generated feeling of authorship. That feeling is not a thought. It is a perception. And perceptions are far harder to override than thoughts.
This is why well-designed mentalism effects produce such profound reactions. The spectator is not just surprised. They are experiencing a direct contradiction between their perception of their own agency and the evidence of an impossible prediction. The conflict is between what they feel and what they see. And when feeling and seeing contradict each other, the result is not confusion — it is wonder.
The Hotel Room Reflection
Late at night, in hotel rooms across Austria, I have spent many hours thinking about what Wegner’s research means — not just for performance, but for how we experience our lives.
If the feeling of free will is an inference rather than a direct perception — if it is constructed from cues rather than observed directly — then our entire experience of agency is, in some sense, a narrative our brain tells us. We feel that we are the authors of our choices. We feel that our intentions cause our actions. And for practical purposes, we are right often enough that the system works.
But the system can be wrong. The Ouija board experiment proves it. The lottery ticket experiment proves it. The forcing experiments prove it. In specific, carefully designed situations, the feeling of free will persists even when the will played no causal role.
I do not find this depressing. I find it awe-inspiring. The machinery of human consciousness is so sophisticated that it generates, in real time, a coherent narrative of agency and authorship that usually matches reality but can be elegantly separated from it in the right conditions.
That separation is where wonder lives. And understanding why the spectator believes so deeply that they chose freely — understanding the cognitive machinery that generates that belief — is not about undermining the spectator’s experience. It is about respecting it. It is about understanding just how real the experience of freedom is for them, and designing performances that honor that experience while creating the conditions for something impossible to emerge from it.
The spectator chose freely. They know they chose freely. Nothing you can tell them will change that feeling. And from within that unshakable certainty of freedom, the impossible happened.
That is the illusion of conscious will in action. And it is one of the most beautiful things I have ever learned about how the human mind works.