Kahneman describes a simple experiment with a spinning wheel.
The wheel is rigged to land on either 10 or 65. Participants spin the wheel, see the number, then answer the question: “What percentage of African nations are UN members?”
People who spun 10 guessed about 25%. People who spun 65 guessed about 45%.
A randomly generated number from a clearly irrelevant wheel contaminated their estimate for a completely unrelated factual question. The anchor — even an obviously arbitrary one — pulled their thinking toward it.
This is the anchoring effect. The first number you’re given shapes your subsequent reasoning, even when you know the first number is meaningless. Even when you’ve been told it’s random.
And if a randomly spun wheel can do this with factual estimates, what can a deliberate performer do with a carefully chosen opening?
How Anchoring Works in Performance
Every performance has an opening moment that sets expectations. The audience doesn’t walk in as blank slates. They come with priors — assumptions about magic shows, about performers, about what’s going to happen. But those priors are loose until your opening anchors them.
The first thing you say, the first thing you do, the first impression you make — these set a reference point. Everything that follows gets evaluated against that reference point.
If you open by understating — “I want to show you something small, just a little something” — you’ve set a low anchor. Everything you do from there will be evaluated against “small” and “little.” If your subsequent work is genuinely impressive, it will feel disproportionately impressive because it so dramatically exceeds the anchored expectation.
If you open with grandiose promises — “I’m going to do something impossible, something that will change how you think about the nature of reality” — you’ve set a high anchor. Now everything you do will be evaluated against that claim. Good work that would otherwise be impressive feels merely adequate because it falls short of what was promised.
Neither anchor is inherently right or wrong. But the choice is consequential, and most performers make it instinctively rather than deliberately.
The Credential Paradox
There’s a specific anchoring problem in magic that I’ve had to work through: credentials.
Before any performance, someone usually introduces you or you introduce yourself. What do you say? In a keynote context, I’m introduced with professional credentials — consulting background, Vulpine Creations, the keynote context. That’s an anchor for the professional material. But what anchor does it set for the magic?
If I say “Felix is a strategy consultant who does some magic,” the magic is anchored as secondary, recreational, minor. When I then do something genuinely impossible, it will surprise them — but the anchor of “does some magic” will limit how much credit they give the craft itself.
If I say nothing about the magic credentials and let the work speak, there’s no anchor limiting expectations — but there’s also no anchor managing them upward from zero.
I’ve experimented with different anchors and found that understatement in framing combined with overperformance in effect creates the most powerful combination. Tell them less than they’re going to see. Let the gap between anchor and reality do emotional work.
The specific words I’ve landed on tend to be curious and open-ended: “something happened that I’ve been thinking about” or “I’ve been studying something odd” or “this might not work but I want to try it with this group.” These set uncertain, slightly low anchors. The performance then overshoots them. The overshoot is experienced as a gift.
Numbers as Anchors
Magic and mentalism are full of numbers. Dates, chosen numbers, calculations, statistics. Each of these can be a deliberate anchor.
If I tell you I’m going to think of a number between 1 and 10, you immediately anchor at 5 (the midpoint) and near it. If I tell you I’m going to think of a number between 1 and 100, you anchor at 50 and cluster around it.
Experienced mentalists use this explicitly — knowing that certain number ranges produce clustered guesses because of anchoring, and designing effects around those clusters. But that’s a technical application.
The broader application is in how you describe the stakes and scope of what you’re doing. “I’m going to try to guess roughly what you’re thinking” sets an anchor on approximation. “I’m going to know exactly what you’re thinking, down to the specific word” sets a precision anchor. The same result — correctly identifying what someone is thinking — lands completely differently against these two anchors.
Against the approximation anchor, an exact guess feels extraordinary. Against the precision anchor, anything less than exact feels like failure.
I always anchor below what I can deliver. Always. Not dramatically below — obvious self-deprecation reads as performance and the audience adjusts for it. But genuinely below: framing the task as harder, more uncertain, or more modest than the result will actually be.
The First Physical Action
Anchoring isn’t only about words. The first physical action you take sets an expectation for the physical register of the performance.
If you open by carefully, deliberately laying out a complex array of props, you’ve anchored a complex, prop-heavy performance. The audience expects a lot of visible apparatus. When you use less than expected, there’s a pleasant simplicity surprise. When later props appear unexpectedly, they’ve broken from a pattern.
If you open with your hands apparently empty — nothing in them, nothing on the table — you’ve set a minimal-apparatus anchor. Every subsequent object that appears has to justify its appearance against that anchor. But an effect performed with apparently empty hands in that context feels more impossible because you’ve anchored the expectation of no apparatus.
Steve Martin, in his memoir about his early magic career, describes the way the smallest stage choices build expectations that later choices have to work with. Opening actions are not preliminary — they’re foundational.
The Opening Line Problem
Here’s a specific anchoring failure I see often in newer performers.
The opening line of a show is frequently something apologetic, something that hedges. “I’ll try my best.” “This is a bit different from what you might expect.” “I’m not sure how this will go tonight.”
These are anchors for uncertainty and low confidence. They’re usually said because the performer is uncertain and low confidence and the truth leaks through. But they’re catastrophic as opening anchors.
An audience anchored to “I’ll try my best” will evaluate everything that follows against: is this person’s best good enough? They’re in evaluative mode from the first moment. Every subsequent decision, every effect, every moment of patter will be filtered through “is this good enough?” rather than “what is this?”
The correct opening anchor — even if you feel uncertain — is one of calm expectation. Not “watch how amazing this is,” which overshoots. But something that suggests: what happens next is natural, expected, appropriate. The confidence of the opening sets the confidence of the audience’s experience.
This was hard for me to internalize. In my early performing, I was genuinely nervous, and that nervousness wanted to express itself as hedging. Saying “I’ll try my best” felt honest, which felt virtuous.
What it actually did was sabotage every subsequent moment by anchoring low expectations and high evaluation mode. The audience was watching me try my best. I needed them watching something happen to them, not watching my effort.
Anchoring at the Close
There’s also a closing anchor.
Whatever you say and do at the very end establishes the frame in which the audience processes what they just experienced. If you close with something that frames the experience as entertainment — “thank you for watching” — it gets processed as entertainment. If you close with something that frames it as having meant something — a moment of quiet, a reflection, a statement that connects the experience to something larger — it gets processed accordingly.
I’ve watched performers do extraordinary work and then end with logistical information. “Business cards are at the back.” The anchor at the close is practical. And somehow the extraordinary thing that just happened feels slightly diminished, because the final frame around it is administrative.
The anchor doesn’t have to be pretentious or grand. But it should be intentional. It should frame what just happened in the way you want it to be remembered.
The opening anchors expectations. The close anchors meaning.
Both are in your control. Neither should be left to chance.