Houdini's psychology fail

By Brian Clegg

I’m currently enjoying Tim Harford’s three part series on Houdini on his Cautionary Tales podcast. Although best remembered as an escapologist, in the later part of his life, Harry Houdini included a section in his act that involved unmasking spirit mediums as fake.

Earlier, Houdini had become friends with Arthur Conan Doyle, who became a fervent spiritualist and whose wife was a medium. Apparently, in one final attempt to persuade Doyle of the folly of his beliefs, Houdini did a demonstration for Doyle in his New York apartment. He hung a small blackboard from the ceiling out of reach, asked Doyle to to go out of the apartment and write a message on a piece of paper. When Doyle returned, Houdini got Doyle to stick a cork ball soaked in white ink on the board – to Doyle’s amazement, the ball then wrote out his message (the Aramaic phrase Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin – mentioned in the Bible’s book of Daniel) on the board.

Houdini did this to demonstrate how the apparent abilities of spirit mediums could be reproduced and even bettered by using a magic trick. Doyle, unfortunately, simply didn’t believe Houdini’s denials and thought it was the act of a genuine medium.

But here’s the odd thing. To be a stage magician you need to be a good psychologist. Yet it was almost inevitable that this would be the outcome. Houdini told Doyle he wasn’t going to explain to him how the trick was done – Doyle had to take Houdini’s word for it that it was faked. In my recent book Brainjacking, in a chapter on deception, I look at how Derren Brown describes using psychology to build the impact of a simple trick. But this only really works because in his book, as part of doing so, Brown describes how the trick works. 

You might say, ‘But magicians can’t explain their tricks, or they lose their mystique’. However, it seems that Houdini had learned magic originally from a book. And there was nothing to stop him saying to Doyle he would tell how the trick worked as long as Doyle – a gentleman who wouldn’t break his word – swore not to tell. The only way this ‘proof’ would have succeeded was if Houdini had thought a little more about the psychology of his interaction with Doyle. Things could have ended very differently. 

If we are to unmask deception (or disinformation) we need to be careful not to be practising deception ourselves as part of the attempt.

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.