Research
Interest in magic methods can be traced back throughout recorded history, but in the past 20 years, the Science of Magic has recently been undergoing a renaissance.
The Westcar Papyrus dates to around the 18th Century BCE and seems to tell the story of a magician performing 'miracles' in the court of the Egyptian pharaoh Khufu. While the story is probably best considered as a fairy tale rather than a historical account, it nonetheless shows that the idea of performing miraculous tricks for audiences dates back to some of the world's earliest written records.
Classic Misdirection depicted in Heironymus Bosch's 'The Conjurer"
Since the year 2000, the body of experimental scientific literature on the topic of performance magic has continued to rise dramatically. To date, 109 empirical papers have been published on the topic of adult perceptions of magic tricks within the last 20 years, compared to the 12 that were published in the preceding century, between 1887 and 1999. The idea of investigating the psychology of magic is not new (indeed it arguably dates back to the earliest days of experimental psychology), but this recent level of interest is historically unprecedented.
Several examples of these new studies are currently available as OpenAccess articles: check-out Frontiers in Psychology’s Special Issue titled: Psychology of Magic and the Magic of Psychology.
You can also sign-up to our newsletter to receive a free bibliography listing every published empirical study of adult perceptions of magic tricks between 1887-2024.