People Agree It ’s Harder To Conjure A Frog With Magic Than Change Its Colour – Suggesting We Use Our Intuitive Physics To Make Sense Of Imaginary Worlds

via McCoy and Ullman (2019) By Christian Jarrett In a world with magic, how much effort do you think it would take to cast a spell to make a frog appear out of nowhere? What about to turn a frog invisible? Or make it levitate? And would it be easier to levitate a frog than a cow? The researchers John McCoy and Tomer Ullman recently put such questions to hundreds of participants across three studies and found they were in remarkable agreement. The findings, published in PLOS One, suggest that we invoke our intuitive understanding of the physical world – our “folk physics” – to make sense of imaginary worlds. And they help explain why fantasy TV shows and books can lose their magic as soon as it feels like anything goes. “Superman leaps tall buildings in a single bound, but a building takes more sweat than an ant-hill,” the researchers said. “And even for Superman, leaping to Alpha Centauri is simply silly.” In the first of three studies, McCoy and Ullman asked over 200 online participants (aged 18 to 83) to imagine a world in which wizards cast spells and to rank 10 spells in order of how much effort they would require. There was striking agreement across the participants that the easiest spell would be one that changed a frog’s colour and the hardest would be to conjure a frog into existence. In between, from easiest to hardest, the participants ranked the other spells as follows: levitate; teleport; make bigger; turn invisibl...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Educational Magic Source Type: blogs