The Magician's Choice: Providing Illusory Choice and Sense of Agency With the Equivoque Forcing Technique

Forcing techniques allow magicians to subtly influence spectators' choices and the outcome of their actions, and they provide powerful tools to study decision-making and the illusory sense of agency and freedom over choices we make. We investigated the equivoque force, a technique that exploits semantic ambiguities and people's failure to notice inconsistencies, to ensure that a spectator ends up with a predetermined outcome. Similar to choice blindness paradigms, the equivoque forces participants to end up with an item they did not choose in the first place. However, here, the subterfuge is accomplished in full view. In 3 experiments, we showed that the equivoque is highly effective in providing participants an illusory sense of agency over the outcome of their actions, even after 2 repetitions of the trick (Experiment 2) and using items for which preexisting preferences can be present (Experiment 3). Across all experiments, participants were oblivious to inconsistencies in the procedure used to guide their decisions, and they were genuinely surprised by the experimenter's matching prediction. Contrary to our prediction, the equivoque force did not significantly change participants' preference for the chosen item. We discuss the results with regard to other illusions of agency (e.g., forcing, choice blindness), failures in noticing semantic inconsistencies (e.g., Moses illusion), and issues surrounding choice-induced-preference literature.