ORCID
- Gustav Kuhn: 0000-0003-2888-914X
Abstract
Magic tricks provide a uniquely powerful window onto the boundaries of what people consider possible, and the ways in which those boundaries can be challenged. Although there exists an effectively infinite variety of magic tricks, relatively little is known about how different magical effects relate to one another at a psychological level. Previous attempts to classify magic have largely relied on the judgments of a small number of expert magicians, rather than capturing people’s intuitive understanding of magical phenomena. Here, we introduce a new multi-dimensional taxonomy of magic that treats the observable effect (e.g., an object vanishing) and the attributed cause (e.g., a magic wand) as independent dimensions. This framework allows a wide range of magic tricks to be systematically described and captures the vast majority of known magical effects. We evaluated the psychological validity of this taxonomy by asking participants to judge the perceived similarity between magic tricks drawn from each category. These similarity judgments were used to construct a dendrogram, revealing a hierarchical structure that reflects how people cognitively organise magical effects. The results corroborate several key distinctions traditionally made by magicians, such as the separation between mental and physical effects, while also revealing more subtle patterns in the perception of magic that have not previously been documented. Together, these findings provide a psychologically grounded framework for understanding how people categorise and experience magical impossibilities.
DOI Link
Publication Date
2026-06-13
Publication Title
Cognition
Volume
275
ISSN
0010-0277
Acceptance Date
2026-06-04
Deposit Date
2026-06-08
Funding
None.
Additional Links
Keywords
Causal reasoning, Taxonomy, Intuitive physics, Belief violation, Similarity judgments, Folk categorization
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Kuhn, G., Thomas, C., & Thomas, G. (2026) 'A folk taxonomy of magic', Cognition, 275. Available at: 10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106610
