There is a question I used to ask myself every time I was putting together a set for a keynote or a corporate event: what should I optimize for? Should I go for the biggest laughs? The most visual effects? The most technically demanding material? Should I aim for elegance, for beauty, for the kind of quiet sophistication that makes fellow magicians nod in approval?
I spent years asking the wrong version of this question. The right version, it turns out, is much simpler. And the answer is backed by data.
Surprise. That is what audiences value most. Not beauty. Not humor. Not skill. Not visual spectacle. Surprise.
When I encountered this finding in Gustav Kuhn and Alice Pailhes’s research on the psychology of magic, it rearranged my thinking about effect selection in a way that has not worn off since.
The Data Behind the Claim
The research is straightforward. When audiences are surveyed about what they value most in a magic performance — when they are asked to rate the emotions and experiences that matter to them — surprise consistently ranks at the top. Above amusement. Above admiration for skill. Above visual beauty. Above the intellectual satisfaction of trying to figure out how something was done.
This finding appears across multiple studies and multiple populations. It is not a quirk of one particular sample or one particular style of magic. It is a robust, replicated finding about what human beings want from a magical experience. They want to be surprised. They want to experience something they did not expect. They want their predictions about what is going to happen next to be violated in a way that produces that specific, sharp, involuntary emotional response we call surprise.
The top emotional responses that audiences report after watching magic are telling: surprise, interest, excitement, amusement, amazement. Notice the order. Surprise is first. It is the gateway emotion. It is the one that opens the door for everything else.
Why This Finding Is Counterintuitive
If you are a magician — especially if you are a technically accomplished magician — this finding should make you uncomfortable. Because the implication is that the thing you have spent the most time perfecting may not be the thing your audience values most.
I know magicians who have spent years mastering beautiful, flowing manipulations. Cards appearing and vanishing in elegant sequences, coins rolling across knuckles with balletic grace, silk productions that unfold like choreographed dances. These are genuinely beautiful performances. They demonstrate extraordinary skill. They are aesthetically pleasing in a way that few other art forms can match.
And they consistently underperform, in audience response, compared to a single unexpected moment that catches the audience completely off guard.
This was a hard lesson for me. When I was deep in the card magic phase of my development — those late nights in hotel rooms, working through tutorials from ellusionist.com, building my card handling one move at a time — I was optimizing for smoothness, for elegance, for technical precision. I wanted my handling to be beautiful. I wanted magicians who watched me to think “that was clean.”
What I should have been optimizing for was the moment when the spectator’s reality breaks. The moment when something happens that they genuinely did not see coming.
The Architecture of Surprise
Understanding that surprise is the dominant emotion changes how you think about building effects. It is not enough to do something impossible. You have to do something impossibly unexpected.
These are different things. Consider a classic card revelation where the performer finds a selected card. The audience expects the performer to find the card — that is the premise of the effect. When the card is revealed, the audience is impressed but not necessarily surprised. They knew a revelation was coming. The method was mysterious, but the outcome was predictable.
Now consider a moment where the spectator’s card appears somewhere genuinely impossible and completely unanticipated. Not in the deck, not in the performer’s hand, but in their own pocket, or inside a sealed envelope that has been sitting on the table since before the trick began, or written on the back of a business card they have been holding the entire time. The impossibility is the same — a card was found. But the surprise is dramatically higher because the location, the timing, or the mechanism was not anticipated.
The research confirms what the best performers have always known intuitively: the element of surprise is not just about what happens, but about the gap between what the audience expected to happen and what actually happened. The wider that gap, the stronger the emotional response.
Implications for Effect Selection
Once I internalized this finding, I started evaluating every effect in my repertoire through a new lens. Not “is this impressive?” but “is this surprising?”
Some effects that I thought were strong turned out to be impressive but predictable. The audience could sense the structure. They knew where the trick was heading. The method was invisible, the execution was clean, but the surprise was moderate because the outcome fell within the range of what they expected from a magic performance.
Other effects that I had considered minor — effects that were technically simple but delivered an unexpected punch — turned out to be far more powerful than I had credited. A simple moment where something happens that nobody in the room anticipated can outperform a technically complex routine that follows a predictable arc.
This does not mean you should abandon technical skill or visual beauty. It means you should deploy them in service of surprise. The most powerful combination is an effect that is both technically excellent and genuinely surprising. Beauty without surprise is pleasant but forgettable. Surprise without beauty is jarring but memorable. Both together is extraordinary.
The Surprise Audit
I now run what I call a “surprise audit” on every set before I perform it. For each effect, I ask three questions.
First: at what exact moment does the audience experience surprise? Not wonder, not appreciation, not amusement — surprise specifically. That sharp intake of breath, that involuntary “what?” If I cannot identify a specific moment of genuine surprise in the effect, the effect has a problem.
Second: does the audience see the surprise coming? If they do, it is not surprise. It is confirmation of an expectation. A climax that the audience can predict, even if they do not know the method, fails the surprise test. The best surprises come from moments where the audience is not even thinking about what just happened because they were focused on something else entirely.
Third: how many surprises are in this set? One surprise in a five-effect set is not enough. The research tells us that surprise is the most valued emotion. If I am only delivering it once, I am leaving value on the table. But the surprises cannot all be of the same type or they become predictable in themselves. Variety of surprise is as important as frequency of surprise.
What Surprise Is Not
It is important to distinguish surprise from shock. Surprise is a positive emotional experience in a performance context. Shock is its aggressive cousin. Shock can be created through volume, through sudden threatening movement, through violation of social norms. Shock gets a reaction, but it is not the reaction that audiences report valuing.
When the research says surprise is the most valued emotion, it means the kind of surprise that comes from having your understanding of reality pleasantly disrupted. Not the kind that comes from someone jumping out from behind a curtain and screaming.
Similarly, surprise is not the same as confusion. Confusion is a cognitive state in which the audience does not understand what is happening. Surprise is a cognitive state in which the audience understands perfectly what happened but did not expect it. The distinction matters enormously. An audience that is confused may be intrigued, but an audience that is surprised is delighted. The research shows that both emotions play a role in the magical experience, but surprise is the one that audiences consistently rank highest.
The Competitive Advantage of Surprise
From a strategic perspective — and I cannot help thinking about these things through a strategy lens — the primacy of surprise creates a competitive advantage for performers who are willing to think differently about their material.
Most magicians optimize for the same things: clean technique, beautiful props, smooth choreography, clever methods. These are all important. But if everyone is optimizing for the same variables, the result is a field of performers who look remarkably similar to an audience’s eye. Technically excellent, aesthetically pleasing, and somehow unmemorable.
The performer who optimizes for surprise stands out. Not because they are sloppier or less skilled, but because they are designing their performances around the one variable that the audience values above all others. They are, to borrow a phrase from my consulting world, competing on the axis that matters most to the customer.
I have started designing my keynote magic with this principle at the forefront. Instead of asking “what will look impressive?” I ask “what will catch them completely off guard?” Instead of building toward a predictable climax, I build toward a moment that reframes everything that came before it. Instead of showing skill, I create experiences where the audience’s model of reality breaks in a way they did not anticipate.
The Mentalism Connection
This finding also explains something I have observed since moving into mentalism. Mentalism, at its core, is built on surprise. The moment when a performer reveals a thought that they could not possibly know is a pure surprise experience. There is no buildup of physical props, no visual display of skill, no aesthetic spectacle. There is simply a moment when something happens that should not be possible.
And audiences respond to mentalism with disproportionate intensity compared to many forms of visual magic. The research on audience preferences — which shows that roughly half of audiences prefer mentalism over traditional magic — may be partly explained by this finding about surprise. Mentalism delivers the thing audiences value most, in its purest form, without the visual trappings that can actually dilute the surprise by telegraphing that something magical is about to happen.
When I walk on stage at a keynote and ask someone to think of something, there are no props signaling “magic is about to happen.” There is just a conversation. And when the reveal comes, the surprise is uncontaminated by expectation. The gap between what the audience expected (a conversation) and what happened (an apparent impossibility) is maximized.
Redesigning Around the Primary Emotion
The practical takeaway from this research is that every performer should audit their material with surprise as the primary criterion. Not the only criterion — entertainment value, flow, character consistency, and technical reliability all matter. But if you had to rank the criteria, surprise should be at the top of the list.
This means being willing to cut effects that are beautiful but predictable. It means being willing to restructure routines so that the surprise comes at an unexpected moment rather than at the obvious climax. It means being willing to sacrifice some visual elegance in exchange for a moment of genuine “I did not see that coming.”
It means, in short, building your show around what the audience actually wants rather than what you, the performer, find most satisfying to execute.
The data is clear. Surprise outranks everything. The question is whether you are willing to let that finding reshape your work. In my case, it did. And the reactions have been telling me, show after show, that the research was right.