Testing Failure
/In mentalism there is the notion that getting something wrong can strengthen the overall impact of an effect. For example, if you’ve written down the name Jane and I “read your mind” and I’m getting “Jen… or Jan, maybe?” That, perhaps, gives some credence to the notion that I didn’t just read directly what you wrote down on that sheet of paper. If I had, then why would I be struggling? This is, I think, pretty sound reasoning.
Earlier this year we did some testing of this idea by performing a mentalism routine for people and having the performer nail the the thought of word directly or have him be slightly off. Later the effect was rated by the spectators based on impossibility and enjoyment and we got my least favorite sort of result when it comes to testing: there was essentially no difference in the ratings. Now, there are many people who would say that spending money to test magic is already the equivalent of setting cash on fire, but when you don’t get a definitive answer out of it, then it certainly feels like a giant waste of time and effort. (I guess technically we did get an answer, but the answer was “no difference,” so it felt like it wasn’t much of an answer.)
But we also did a smaller test that I do think produced some somewhat interesting results. What we wanted to test was get people’s responses to different types of failure.
Here’s what I mean by “type” of failure…
If you’re thinking of Jane and I say Jen, that’s one type of failure.
If you’re thinking of Jane and I say Patricia, that’s a very different type of failure.
If you’re thinking of Jane and I say, “Sorry, nothing is coming through,” that’s a third type of failure.
Let’s call these The Near Miss, The Total Miss, and The Missed Connection.
Here is what we did. We gathered people (25 in total) in groups of 2-4 to watch a short presentation from three performers. They were informed that they were seeing things in the early stages so there were still some rough edges, but we were just looking for their general feedback.
Each group saw some magic, some mentalism, and a a sleight-of-hand-gambling demonstration—each from a different performer.
The magician always did two coin tricks that worked.
The sleight-of-hand “expert” always did one demonstration that almost worked (he stacked four out of five cards in a royal flush, missing on one).
The mentalist’s performance was the only one that was different from group to group. This was the breakdown:
7 people saw a mind-reading card trick and a successful word reveal
6 people saw a mind-reading card trick, followed by a word reveal that was slightly wrong. (Near Miss)
6 people saw a mind-reading card trick, followed by a word reveal that was way off. (Total Miss)
6 people saw a mind-reading card trick, followed by an attempted word reveal where the mentalist never made a guess because he wasn’t picking up anything. (Missed Connection)
After each “show” there was a 10 minute conversation with the audience, the performers, and one of the people coordinating the testing. The conversation was very general, “What did you like, what didn’t you like. What did you find interesting. Etc.”. We didn’t have a real way to quantify what we were looking for at this point. I just wanted to get a feel for the response.
One thing that was very clear to me was that being wrong—like totally wrong, like saying, “You thought of a hammer,” when they thought of a sandwich—was not a positive in any regard. People were much less inclined to engage with that performer, or talk/ask questions about his performance when there was a total miss.
You might say, “Well, no one ever suggests getting things completely wrong in mentalism.” But that’s not quite true. I’ve seen people encourage performers to take risky guesses in hopes of getting something right. Or they’ll say it doesn’t matter if your psychological force doesn’t hit because being wrong can strengthen the effect. But in both those cases, you can end up being very wrong.
After the testing we did that day, my friend Mark, who was one of the performers, did come up with some data that was measurable from the post-performance conversations we had. He calculated the amount of time that was spent with each group interacting with the mentalist (as opposed to with the gambling expert or the magician) in the conversation after each performance.
The people who saw two successful tricks from the mentalist spent half of the discussion time (50%) talking/interacting with the mentalist.
The people who saw the successful trick and the Total Miss spent 19% of the time discussion time talking to the mentalist.
The people who saw the successful trick and the Near Miss spent 58% of the discussion time talking to the mentalist.
The people who saw the successful trick and the Missed Connection spent 56% of the discussion time talking to the mentalist.
If we extrapolate those numbers out (and I realize that requires a bit of a leap of faith when dealing with just a handful of people in each group) we can perhaps come to this conclusion:
A near miss (or even a failure to connect at all) in mentalism may not make a trick significantly more impressive or entertaining, but it has the potential to make a mentalism effect a little more intriguing. It perhaps gives the audience a little more to think about. There was slightly more conversation with the mentalist when their presentation included this kind of miss.
However a Total Miss tended to shut-down engagement significantly.
Here is my theory as to why…
When we present mind reading, it’s done as a type of communication between two people (generally). How does communication work?
I send a message and you receive it.
or
I send a message but it’s not 100% clear.
or
I send a message but it doesn’t come through.
Everyone understands those situations. But what doesn’t happen in communication is: I send a message and you receive something completely different. So, in the example of a psychological force that doesn’t work, where I say you’re thinking of the 7 of Hearts, but you’re actually thinking of the 2 of Clubs, this doesn’t feel like failed communication—because that’s not how communication fails—it just feels like a failed trick or a wrong guess and there’s nothing in those two circumstances that will be perceived as interesting to anyone.
So what do I take from all of this? I would say that my interpretation of this is that in mentalism the occasional failure isn’t necessarily bad, and perhaps is even beneficial, so long as it feels like a genuine failure of communication. So if I’m ever going to script a failure, it would be of the “near miss” kind.
I will try to avoid “total miss” failure altogether. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained from it. The nice thing about mentalism is if you see yourself staring down the barrel of a “total miss,” you almost always have an out. You can say, “There’s something wrong. There’s a problem with the signal. Can we try again?” This “missed connection” type of failure doesn’t harm the story you’re telling and may, in fact, be beneficial. (Also, in amateur magic, you have the luxury of suggesting “trying again” an hour or a day or a week later. And creating this narrative that rolls on beyond a two-minute trick is always a positive in my book.)
In an upcoming post (maybe the next one) I want to discuss the use of failure in more traditional types of magic. I think it’s an under-explored idea and more powerful than you might initially imagine.