Cultivating Confidence

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Humans are uniquely wired to learn from each other, but we also have robust defenses against deception.

The real magician’s trick is to turn a room full of skeptics into a fully immersed audience.

We often need to tell whether someone is an expert in a field in which we ourselves are not experts.

Like many other startups during the deepest stretch of COVID lockdowns, we decided on a remote team-building experience to keep our spirits up. Soon, 10 of us appeared on a Zoom call, staring at our webcams, waiting for a virtual magician to arrive.

Magician is a tough career choice. It takes way too much practice just to get started, and there's very little margin for error. People in the audience are watching closely for mistakes, hoping to find out how a trick works.

To do all of this online puts the bar impossibly high. My generation grew up watching movies with awe-inspiring computer graphics, and played video games that look realer than real. So if we encounter something on-screen with no obvious explanation, we will safely write off the absolute best illusion and impeccable sleight of hand as some kind of internet trickery.

Needless to say, our virtual magician had his job cut out for him. We were a highly skeptical audience on high alert, arriving with the shared assumption that we could deconstruct whatever was about to happen on screen.

The instructions told us to bring our own pack of cards to the show. When it came to the main act, we picked a random card, looked at it, and were in for a big surprise: The illusionist accurately guessed the cards exactly as only we could see them. He certainly couldn’t have seen........

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