Cyril Thomas

• Doctor of Psychology
• University of Franche-Comté

Since the seminal work of Tversky and Kahneman (1974), the anchoring effect has generated considerable interest and its effects have been extensively documented in numerous everyday situations. However, few studies have paid attention to the influence of multiple successive anchors. To analyze how the presentation of a second anchor influences lega...

Magic is an art form that creates illusory experiences of impossibility by generating a conflict between what we witness and what we believe about the world. The uniqueness of this art has intrigued researchers for over a century. The present study explores the social representations of magic among magicians and non-magicians to understand how thes...

Since the seminal works from Tversky and Kahneman (1974), the anchoring effect has generated considerable interest and its impact in numerous everyday situations has been fully documented. However, few studies have paid attention to the influence of several successive anchors. To analyze how the presentation of a second anchor influences legal deci...

Over the past 7 decades, researchers have examined the personalities of creative individuals across various fields, including architecture, art, and science, for instance. These studies have highlighted distinct conative and cognitive traits associated with each of these different domains. But what about the creators in relatively unexplored domain...

Since the seminal works from Tversky and Kahneman (1974), the anchoring effect has generated considerable interest and its impact in numerous everyday situations has been fully documented. However, few studies have paid attention to the influence of several successive anchors. To analyze how the presentation of a second anchor influences legal deci...

Many magic tricks rely solely on vision, but there are few, if any, that rely on auditory perception alone. Here, we question why this is so and argue that research focusing on this issue could provide deeper theoretical insights into the similarities and differences between our senses.

In our everyday life, we are constantly exposed to multiple pieces of information from different sources with varying degrees of relevance. It is therefore important to understand whether exposure to information from sources we know to be irrelevant can influence us. This study examines this question through the lens of the anchoring effect (Tversk...

En 1974, Tversky et Kahneman mettent en évidence un biais cognitif spectaculaire survenant dans la prise de décisions en situation d’incertitude : l’effet d’ancrage. La robustesse et l’ubiquité de cet effet font de lui un phénomène particulièrement fascinant, qui a conduit, depuis cette première recherche, à une littérature abondante. Où en sommes-...

In the "classic" vanishing ball illusion (VBI), a magician pretends to throw a ball and the audience sees it go up and then disappear. To gain a better understanding of the mechanisms involved, we conducted two experiments to analyze the per-meability of this type of illusion to auditory information. A modified version of the VBI (i.e., the Vanishi...

Dans « Le monde perdu », ouvrage de Conan Doyle publié en 1912, une expédition découvre en Amérique du Sud une zone coupée du reste du monde qui abrite de très nombreuses espèces inconnues, héritières directes des dinosaures. Existe-il pour les chercheurs en psychologie un terrain d’étude qui permettrait de découvrir chez l’humain des processus men...

Misinformation can have a detrimental impact on our beliefs, and it is therefore necessary to understand the cognitive mechanism by which false information is integrated or can be changed. In two experiments, we worked with fake psychic demonstrations, because observers easily adopt the experience as reflecting a « true » psychic event. We manipula...

While many studies have highlighted the existence of the anchoring effect in a wide variety of domains, no study to date has investigated its impact on memory. The present study aims to test whether an irrelevant numerical anchor not only influences an estimate but also modifies the memory of the associated event. Two experiments (total N = 259) we...

The anchoring effect and the Einstellung effect are two cognitive biases studied in different areas of psychology: respectively, decision making and problem solving. In both cases, the activation of an irrelevant representation creates a "mental set" effect. This article presents an overview of the apparent similarities and dis-similarities between...

To facilitate our interactions with the surroundings, the human brain sometimes reshapes the situations that it faces in order to simplify them. This phenomenon has been widely studied in the context of reasoning, especially through the attribute substitution error. It has however been given much less attention in the field of perception. Recent re...

The art of magic relies on tricking our brains into experiencing the impossible. Years of performance experience has allowed magicians to refine and perfect their deceptive techniques, and scientists have now started to investigate these techniques to help uncover some of the mysteries of the human brain. The Science of Magic has become a field of...

We present two experiments investigating the effect of the perceived gender of a magician on the perception of the quality of magic tricks. In Experiment 1, tricks performed by an allegedly female magician were considered worse than those by an allegedly male magician. In Experiment 2, participants had to generate possible solutions to how the tric...

En octobre 1894 paraît dans la « Revue des Deux Mondes » un article de Binet (1894b) sur une thématique peu commune : la psychologie de la prestidigitation. Binet avait déjà publié quelques articles dans cette revue prestigieuse, notamment une étude sur les calculateurs mentaux (Binet, 1892a), sur l'audition colorée (Binet, 1892b) ou sur les grands...

Beliefs are persistent cognitive processes that guide human thought and behaviour. We can be aware of these beliefs, but not necessarily. These beliefs determine how we perceive and integrate upcoming information, in particular when they are conforming with our pre-existing ideas and prior expectations. Of these, paranormal beliefs are particularly...

Since the seminal study by Chun and Jiang (1998), a large body of research based on the contextual cueing paradigm has shown that the cognitive system is capable of extracting statistical contingencies from visual environments. Most of these studies have focused on how individuals learn regularities found within an intratrial temporal window: a con...

When faced with a difficult question, people sometimes work out an answer to a related, easier question without realizing that a substitution has taken place (e.g., Kahneman; 2011). In two experiments, we investigated whether this attribute substitution effect can also affect the interpretation of a simple visual event sequence. We used a magic tri...

When confronted with an insight problem, some factors limit our capacity to discover the optimal solution. Previous research on problem solving has shown that the first idea that comes to participants’ minds can inhibit them from finding better alternative solutions. We used a magic trick to demonstrate that this mind fixing effect is more general...

In 1894, French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857–1911) published an article titled “The Psychology of Prestidigitation” that reported the results of a study conducted in collaboration with two of the best magicians of that period. By using a new method and new observation techniques, Binet was able to reveal some of the psychological mechanisms invo...

In everyday life, several factors limit the human capacity to think differently. The present study shows that implanting an unlikely and unfamiliar idea in the mind can prevent participants from finding a more obvious one. To demonstrate this, we used a technique often adopted by magicians to misrepresent the method of a trick: the false solution....

In the vanishing ball illusion (VBI), the magician throws a ball up into the air twice and then pretends to do a third throw. On the third (fake) throw, the audience sees the ball go up and then disappear. In this article, we study the psychological mechanisms at play in this magic trick. We test the hypothesis that the illusion is based on represe...

Les magiciens savent manipuler l'attention du spectateur ; c'est ainsi qu'ils font sortir un lapin de leur chapeau. Ils peuvent aussi nous lancer sur une fausse piste pour que nous ne découvrions pas leurs trucs. £ Les chercheurs décortiquent leurs tours et étudient les processus cognitifs en jeu. Mais des zones d'ombre subsistent. £ La cause : les...

In the vanishing ball illusion (VBI), a magician throws a ball up in the air twice, after which he pretends to toss it up again, when in fact it remains secretly concealed in his hand. Observers perceive an imaginary ball disappearing into the air. According to Kuhn and Land (2006), the VBI during the fake throw is mediated by the magician's gaze a...

Magicians often trick spectators' senses by relying on cognitive limitations. To do so, they use intuitive but age-old knowledge of human cognition. Research into the relationship between magic and psychology has been growing for a number of years now. This work offers an original ground for studying cognitive processes, while also providing the op...

L e ballon est-il cadré ? Que va faire mon adversaire ? Un gardien de but au football n'attend pas que la balle soit dans les filets pour plonger dessus ; un boxeur qui ne « lirait » les coups adverses qu'une fois les avoir reçus ferait une piètre carrière… « L'anticipation perceptive » est une capacité essentielle à la plupart des disciplines spor...