The Magic of Critical Thinking

The following show notes are from a presentation I gave at Southwestern Assemblies of God University on August 23, 2016. The PowerPoint and handouts #1, 2, 3, & 4 from the presentation are also available for download.

Magicians as Critical Thinkers

• Robert M. Sapolsky, "A Magician's Best Trick: Revealing a Basic Human Bias," The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 31, 2014)
• Charles Q. Choi, "Study Reveals How Magic Works," LiveScience (Nov 20, 2006)
• Gustav Kuhn, Michael F. Land, "There's more to magic than meets the eye," Current Biology 16/22 (2006). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2006.10.012
• Apollo Robbins is a famous pickpocket who teaches the art of his craft.

Forces

• There are so many ways that magicians can force you to make the choice they want you to take.
• David Blaine famously asked people to think of a two digit number between 1-50, where both numbers are odd and have to be different from one another. Is this your number?
• Think of a number between 1-10 and multiply it by 9...
• Dr. Richard Wiseman's Quirkology regularly produces popular videos that play with the quirks of human perception. His video, "The Test," has a jump scare with a rubber mask at the end. But it, "Dare You Play the Game?", "The Prediction," "The Grid," and "Mind Reading Tee Shirt" all use the illusion of choice as part of their method.
• In 1933 Theodore Annemann wrote a booklet, 202 Methods of Forcing, that discusses card, number, and miscellaneous methods of forcing people to pick the item you want them to pic.
• The Magician's Choice/Equivoqué is another classic method for using the illusion of choice to make you arrive at a preplanned conclusion.

Magic & Logical Fallacies

• The Spurious correlations website excellently illustrates why correlation does not equl causation.
• Penn & Teller are famous for taking an "honest liar" approach to magic. Here they are doing their cups & balls routine.

Memory

• Cold Reading is a nasty psychological manipulation used by so-called psychics and mediums, to prey on those who are in pain. It uses a variety of psychological tricks to manipulate others for one's own self-aggrandizement. Dennis Dutton's "The Cold Reading Technique" Experientia 44 (1988): 356-32 is a must-read on the topic.
• In 1999, M.A. Stadler, H.L. Roediger III, and K.B. McDermott publisehd a study that "induced false recall and false recognition for words that were not presented in lists.They had subjects study 24 lists of 15 words [pdf download] that were associates of a common word...that was not presented in the list. False recall and false recognition of the critical target occurred frequently in response to these lists." ["Norms for word lists that create false memories," Mem Cognit May 27.3 (1999): 494-500.]

Models for Critical Thinking

• The Foundation for Critical Thinking, founded in 1980, has developed the standard model for critical thinking that is in use in colleges and universities today. Its model is comprehensive and rightly deserves pride of place in any critical thinking curriculum.
• A stripped-down model for critical thinking describes it as evidence-based thinking with two main components: tearing down and building up.
• Tearing down involves a continual reassessment of prior beliefs in light of the best available evidence. Students familiar with Mythbusters , Brain Games , and other such edutainment, will already have a frame of reference for this aspect of critical thinking. 
• Building up involves the construction of the most defensible explanation of the extant evidence. Students familiar with Sherlock, Occam's Razor, or writing a five paragraph essay, will already have a frame of reference for this aspect of critical thinking.

Examples for Classroom Use

• CPG Grey, "This Video Will Hurt." About the Nocebo effect.
• Here are five videos exemplifying "Inattentional Blindness"
• Would you ban DHMO (Dihydrogen Monoxide)?
• Here is a basic online Forer Personality Test (aka Barnum Effect)
• Snopes.com's Repository of Lost Legends page leads to a good lesson on the fallacy of False Authority
• Here is an excellent series of brief articles on Expectation Bias and Actor-Observer Asymmetry
• Here is io9.com's popular-level introduction to cognitive biases
  
• The classic Asch Experiment on Candid Camera makes you laught, then makes you think.
  
• Here is one of many online introductions to Logical Fallacies. Just note that many groups who produce introductions to logical fallacies are secular humanists or athiests, so some of their examples will not necessarily be compatible with some Christian worldviews. But even D.A. Carson's classic book Exegetical Fallacies suffers at times from its own unstated major premises.
  
• I maintain a Pinterest pinboard on critical thinking that contains additional examples and images that would be useful for classroom instruction. I also maintain a Tumblr on Exegetical Fallacies that overlaps with the Pinterest board in its focus on illusions and fallacies, but it also contains additional material that is specific to biblical studies.