There is a study about fonts that changed how I think about performance.
Researchers gave two groups of participants the same logical reasoning test. Same questions. Same difficulty. Same time limits. The only difference was the typeface. One group received the questions printed in a clean, easy-to-read font. The other group received them in a difficult, hard-to-read font — something decorative and cramped, the kind of typeface that makes you squint.
The group with the hard-to-read font performed significantly better on the logical reasoning test.
Let that sink in. Making the questions harder to read made people better at answering them. Not because the content changed. Not because the difficult font somehow contained better information. But because the effort of reading — the friction of deciphering the words — activated System 2 analytical thinking. The brain, forced to work harder at the basic task of reading, stayed in analytical mode for the subsequent task of reasoning.
This phenomenon is called disfluency, and when I encountered it while reading cognitive psychology research in a hotel room in Salzburg, the implications for performance were immediate and troubling.
If disfluency activates System 2, then anything in a performance that creates cognitive friction — anything hard to process, awkward to follow, or difficult to parse — is potentially waking up the analytical mind at exactly the moment you need it to stay asleep.
Fluency and Trust
To understand why disfluency matters, you first need to understand its opposite: cognitive fluency.
Cognitive fluency is the subjective experience of ease or difficulty associated with a mental process. When something is easy to process — easy to read, easy to understand, easy to perceive — it is fluent. When something is hard to process, it is disfluent.
The research on fluency shows that it affects far more than just reading speed. Fluency influences trust, liking, truth judgments, and confidence. Statements written in easy-to-read fonts are rated as more truthful than the same statements in hard-to-read fonts. Companies with easy-to-pronounce names are valued higher in the stock market. Recipes with easy-to-read ingredient lists are perceived as easier to cook.
This is not rational. The font has nothing to do with the truth of a statement. The name of a company has nothing to do with its value. But fluency feels like truth. When something flows smoothly through our cognitive system, System 1 interprets that smoothness as a signal of correctness, familiarity, and safety. When something creates friction, System 1 flags it as potentially problematic, and System 2 is called in to investigate.
For performance, this means that fluency is your ally and disfluency is your enemy. Everything that flows — smooth transitions, clear language, natural pacing, familiar procedures — keeps the spectator in System 1 mode. Everything that creates friction — confusing instructions, awkward phrasing, unfamiliar procedures, visual clutter — risks activating System 2.
And as we have discussed throughout this series, System 2 is the enemy of the kind of intuitive, spontaneous responding that makes effects work.
The Performance Friction Points
After reading the disfluency research, I went back through recordings of my performances and listened with new ears. I was not listening for technical errors or timing problems. I was listening for friction — moments where the spectator might experience disfluency.
What I found was uncomfortable.
There were moments in my patter where I used words that were slightly unusual or overly precise. Technical-sounding language that a consultant might use but a normal person in conversation would not. Each of these moments was a tiny spike of disfluency — a small friction point that could nudge the spectator’s brain from System 1 toward System 2.
There were moments in my instructions where I gave too much information at once. “Take any card, remember it, do not show it to anyone, and place it back in the deck wherever you like.” That is four instructions in one sentence. Each instruction requires processing, and the cumulative load creates disfluency. The spectator has to work to understand what they are supposed to do, and that work activates analytical thinking.
There were moments in my physical handling where I did something that looked slightly unnatural. Not a visible error, but a gesture that was a little too careful, a movement that was a little too deliberate. These physical disfluencies are subtle, but they register unconsciously. The spectator may not think “that looked strange,” but their System 1 flags the unnaturalness, and System 2 stirs.
I sat in my hotel room after this analysis feeling both frustrated and grateful. Frustrated because I had been creating unnecessary friction for years without realizing it. Grateful because the diagnosis pointed directly to solutions.
The Language Smoothing Process
The first thing I changed was my language.
I went through every scripted interaction in my repertoire and rewrote it with fluency as the primary criterion. Not clarity — my scripts were already clear. Not precision — I was already precise. Fluency. The ease with which each sentence could be heard, understood, and forgotten.
The rewrites were often small. Replacing a three-syllable word with a one-syllable word. Breaking a compound instruction into two separate sentences. Removing qualifiers and caveats that added precision but created processing load. Swapping formal sentence structures for conversational ones.
“Please select any card from the deck and retain it without revealing it to anyone” became “pick a card, any card, and keep it to yourself.” Same meaning. Dramatically different fluency. The first version forces the spectator to parse formal language, process multiple embedded clauses, and decode the meaning of “retain” and “revealing.” The second version is so conversationally simple that it passes through the cognitive system without friction.
I tested these rewrites at events across Austria over the following months. At a corporate dinner in Linz, I used the new language with half the tables and the old language with the other half, keeping everything else the same. The difference was not dramatic in a way that anyone else would have noticed, but I noticed. The tables with the smoother language were more relaxed. They responded faster. They seemed more spontaneous and less guarded.
I do not have controlled data on this. I am a performer, not a researcher. But the pattern was consistent enough that I have never gone back to the more formal phrasing.
Instructions as Friction Generators
The single biggest source of disfluency in most performance interactions is instructions. Every time you tell a spectator what to do, you are creating a moment of cognitive processing. They have to hear the instruction, understand it, decide what action is required, and then perform that action. Each step is an opportunity for friction.
The research suggests several principles for reducing instruction-based disfluency.
First, keep instructions short. One instruction per sentence. Give the spectator time to process each instruction before adding the next one. The sentence “pick a card” is more fluent than “pick a card and remember it” because it contains only one action.
Second, use concrete language. “Pick a card” is more fluent than “make a selection.” Concrete words are processed faster than abstract ones because they activate richer mental representations. The word “card” immediately conjures a visual image. The word “selection” requires an additional step of interpretation.
Third, use familiar structures. “Think of a number between one and ten” is a culturally familiar request. Most people have heard it before, possibly many times. That familiarity makes it highly fluent — the brain recognizes the pattern and does not need to analyze it. “Select an integer from the first decile of natural numbers” is the same request, but the unfamiliar structure creates friction.
Fourth, match your language to your audience. A room of engineers processes technical language more fluently than a room of artists. A room of corporate executives processes business metaphors more fluently than a room of students. The language that is most fluent is the language that most closely matches the spectator’s own natural vocabulary.
This last point is one I think about constantly. As a consultant who also performs, I naturally speak two languages — the analytical language of strategy and the conversational language of entertainment. In my consulting work, precision and specificity are valued. In performance, simplicity and ease are valued. I have had to learn to switch between these registers depending on context, and the switch is not always smooth.
Visual Fluency Matters Too
Disfluency is not limited to language. It applies to any sensory input that the spectator processes.
Visual disfluency — anything hard to see, hard to parse, or visually confusing — has the same System 2-activating effect as linguistic disfluency. A cluttered table, mismatched props, poor lighting, an awkward physical arrangement — all of these create visual processing friction that works against the intuitive, System 1 state you want the spectator to be in.
I learned this lesson at a corporate event in Vienna where the lighting was poor and my table setup was more cluttered than usual. I had brought extra props because I was not sure which pieces I would perform, and rather than choosing in advance, I left everything on the table. The result was a visual environment that was harder to parse than my usual clean setup. And the audience was noticeably more analytical that evening. More questions. More “wait, do that again” requests. More squinting and leaning in.
At first, I attributed this to the audience. Maybe this was just a tough crowd. But later, thinking about the disfluency research, I reconsidered. The cluttered table and poor lighting created visual disfluency. Every time the spectator looked at my workspace, their brain had to work slightly harder to make sense of what they were seeing. That extra processing load kept System 2 more engaged than usual.
Since then, I have been meticulous about visual simplicity. One effect at a time on the table. Props that contrast clearly against the surface. Clean, uncluttered sight lines. Not because I am a minimalist by nature — I am actually a bit of a maximalist — but because the disfluency research convinced me that visual simplicity directly supports the psychological state I need the audience to be in.
The Naturalness Connection
Disfluency connects directly to one of the oldest principles in magic performance: naturalness.
Derren Brown writes extensively about the importance of naturalness — the idea that every action in a performance should look like something a normal person would do in the same situation. Any unnatural action, no matter how small, creates a moment of disfluency. The spectator’s brain registers “something is off” even if the spectator cannot consciously identify what it is.
The disfluency research gives us the cognitive mechanism behind this intuition. Unnaturalness is disfluent. It creates processing friction. And that friction activates System 2 at exactly the wrong moment.
Brown’s prescription — practice any action until it looks completely natural, until it is indistinguishable from a genuine version of the same action — is the performer’s equivalent of using a clean, easy-to-read font. It maximizes fluency. It minimizes processing friction. It keeps the spectator’s brain in the smooth, trusting, System 1 mode where effects work best.
The Self-Awareness Problem
One of the challenges of applying disfluency insights is that the performer cannot easily detect their own disfluency. This is another manifestation of the curse of knowledge. Because you know what you are doing, your own actions feel fluent to you. You understand your instructions perfectly, so they seem clear. You see your table setup every day, so it seems orderly. Your movements feel natural to you because you have practiced them thousands of times.
But the spectator has no practice. They are encountering your instructions, your setup, and your movements for the first time. What is fluent for you may be disfluent for them.
The only reliable way to detect disfluency in your own performance is external feedback. Video recordings help — watching yourself with the sound off can reveal physical awkwardness that you feel but cannot see. Asking non-magician friends to watch and report what felt confusing or hard to follow helps more. Running the instructions past someone who has never heard them before and watching their face for any flicker of confusion helps most of all.
I do this regularly. Not just for new material, but for effects I have been performing for months or years. Because disfluency can creep in gradually — a phrase that gets slightly longer over time, a gesture that becomes slightly more careful as you become more conscious of technique, a table layout that accumulates one extra prop per month until it is cluttered.
The Deeper Principle
The disfluency research points to a deeper principle that underlies everything in this series of posts about the science of forcing and decision-making.
The spectator’s analytical capacity is not a fixed quantity. It is not the case that some spectators are analytical and others are not. Every spectator has System 2 available. The question is whether and when it gets activated.
System 2 is like a sleeping guard. It can be awakened by noise. Disfluency is noise. Unfamiliar procedures are noise. Awkward language is noise. Visual clutter is noise. Anything that creates cognitive friction, no matter how small, is a knock on the guard’s door.
The performer’s job — from a psychological design perspective — is to minimize noise. To make everything so smooth, so natural, so easy to process that System 2 never has a reason to wake up. The guard sleeps through the entire performance, and System 1 handles everything: the social interaction, the choices, the evaluation of fairness, the experience of wonder.
This does not mean performances should be simple-minded or dumbed down. Engaging storytelling, interesting ideas, and emotional depth are not disfluent. They keep System 2 busy with content that is enjoyable to process. The friction to avoid is not intellectual engagement — it is processing difficulty. The distinction matters.
A hard-to-read font makes you think harder. A hard-to-follow instruction makes you think harder. A hard-to-parse visual environment makes you think harder. And when you are thinking harder, you are more likely to notice things that would otherwise pass you by.
That is the lesson of the font study. And it applies to every moment of every performance where the goal is to maintain the spectator’s intuitive, trusting, System 1 state of mind.
Keep it smooth. Keep it natural. Keep it fluent. Let System 2 sleep.