Mailbag - When They Believe: Part Two
/I've been doing the trick from Joshua Quinn's Christmas gift using DFB. The reactions I have been getting are... different. Even though the people I am doing it on know I do magic tricks, for some reason they are actually buying into the idea that I influenced them to pick that word by having them say the list of random words.
I'm curious what your thoughts are on this? Is there a way to make this even more fantastical so they realize it's a trick?—CY
Okay, this is an easier situation to handle than the ones from yesterday’s letter.
Influence effects frequently hover on the “believable” end of the spectrum. That’s why some people like them. And it’s why I’m not really a huge fan. (And it was the impetus behind last year’s “Influence Month” (March 2023)).
Fortunately, there are a couple of ways of “tuning” an influence effect to make it more or less believable.
The Exposure Approach
In Joshua’s effect, the spectator reads a list of random words:
Aisle
Pickup
Hey
Purple
Lane
And those random words end up “influencing” them later on.
The way Joshua handles it, they read this list of words, memorize it, and repeat it over and over to themselves.
I think the possibility that this process could influence them in some way is relatively high, because there’s a lot of exposure to the influencing stimulus. So, at the end, when you say, “Those words influenced you,” you’re likely to have people thinking they just saw something “interesting,” rather than that they just saw something “amazing.”
To push people more into a fictional, wondrous style of influence, then you will want to lower their exposure to whatever is doing the influencing.
For this trick, maybe they see this odd poster in your house:
That’s weird enough that it would draw attention, but you’re not telling them to memorize the words, it’s just something in the background you ignore.
Or those words could be contained in an email you sent them. Maybe the first or last word in each line.
Or there could be an aborted game of Scrabble on the coffee table with those words in it.
You get the idea. Put the influencing factor in their vicinity, but don’t make it a huge focus. That way, instead of thinking, “That random list of words influenced me,” they’ll think, “Is it possible I really could have been influenced by that poster? [Or whatever.] I remember seeing it, but I didn’t really take it in. I didn’t think so, at least.” At least that way, there’s some level of uncertainty.
If you’re going to use this type of premise, I would go back and read the stuff that was posted during Influence Month, as I think there are inherent problems you may want to address with this style of presentation as well.
Imp-Based Approach
This is, I think, a better way to approach the influence premise. Continuing using Joshua trick as the example, his trick suggests: “those words influenced you.” With an imp-based approach, the premise changes to, “this thing (this thing I had you eat, or inhale, or watch, or listen to, etc.) has made you extra perceptive (or extra susceptible to influence—depending on how you want to play it).”
Do this with a group of three or four people.
ONE person gets the Imp, the others don’t.
But EVERYONE plays along with the experiment.
So, when using it with Joshua’s trick,, they would all try and memorize the words, and they would all look at the second list of words and name a number (refer to the trick write-up linked above). But only the one who was subjected to the Imp would end up having it “work” on him.
This is so much more compelling. Why? Because there’s the pleasure of seeing how the influence worked, compounded with the idea that some special thing allowed the influence to work.
So it’s not just:
X happened → due to the fact you were influenced by Y
it’s
X happened → due to the fact you were influenced by Y → because of Z
Which is just inherently more fascinating.
“I read off a random list of words and was influenced to think of another word because of them.” Cool. But pretty believable.
“Earlier in the evening, he asked me if I liked his new cologne. And apparently at the time when I sniffed his neck I was actually subjected to a pheromone mixture that heightened my senses. And he proved it because we all looked at the random word list, but I was the only one who picked up on the secret message encoded in them.” Cool. Much less believable. But… possible? How would he have access to such pheromones. But… you did pick up on that message.
This is the sort of thing I think about regarding the concept of using “belief as the medium.”
Here’s another way of doing an Imp-based approach with a small group of people, that doesn’t require much in the way of props or anything.
You ask each person to rate themselves on a scale from 1-100 as far as how suggestible/easily-influenced they are. You turn to the person who gave the lowest score. “You’re pretty strong-willed? Not susceptible to influence?” Then you turn to the person who gave the highest score. “But you’re pretty impressionable, you feel? Okay, interesting.”
You write down a prediction and set it aside.
Then you go through Joshua Quinn’s effect, or a similar type of influence effect. You may need to apparently change the subject first. “Okay, I want to get back to that in a bit. But before that, I need to test your memory….” Or something like that.
Then at the end, have it so the influence works on the person who said they were least susceptible to that sort of thing.
And to show that it wasn’t just coincidence, you show what you wrote down earlier which says, “This will work for Bob. The person who thinks they’re the least suggestible is always the most.” Or words to that effect.
So, here the “Imp” used that allows the influence to work is the person’s own certainty that they can’t be influenced.
Which is a more interesting, in my opinion, than influence that works on just anybody.
To make the final twist hit more (that you predicted who it would work on from the start), you’ll want to focus your attention on the person who said they were most influenceable early on. You want to lead people down the garden path to think your attention is on that person because they’re the most susceptible to whatever you’re doing. Then there’s the twist that it ended up working on the one who was most confident they couldn’t be influenced. Followed by the twist that you knew all along that’s who it would work on.