Psychology of Magic: MAX MAVEN

Max Maven and the psychology of lying
Max Maven is well known within magic as being a verbally skilled, improvisational, performer who specialises in ‘mind reading’. As such, he was the ideal performer to explore ideas relating to the psychology of lying.

After initial discussions, Max kindly agreed to be involved in the project, and Wiseman and Lamont filmed him answering three questions about different aspects of his life. He provided two answers to each question – one of the answers was truthful the other was a lie.

Wiseman and Lamont then conducted several studies examining how accurate people were at detecting the lies. One experiment was undertaken in collaboration with Nature.com – the online version of the science journal Nature. Clips in which Max described memories of seeing Victor Borge and Patti LaBelle perform were placed online. Readers were asked to watch the clips and indicate which one they thought was the lie. Just over 650 people took part in this study, with only 46.9% correctly identifying the lie. This is not statistically different from chance guessing. The clips can be seen in the video below.



The first clip, describing a show by Victor Borge was a lie. The second, concerning a concert by Patti LaBelle was the truth.

Max’s behaviour in each of these six clips was rated for the types of verbal and nonverbal signals often emitted by liars, namely; amount of eye contact, number of blinks, number of distractors (hand to mouth, etc.), number of gestures, head movement, hesitations, speech errors, speech rate, self-references, length of answer, number of words in answer.

There was no reliable difference in Max’s nonverbal behaviour when he lied. Only two of the verbal behaviours were statistically significant – when Max lied he engaged in a greater number of self-references, and gave slightly longer answers. Interestingly, although previous research has shown that both of these signals are associated with lying, the pattern exhibited by Max is the opposite to that found in this previous work (i.e., most people make fewer self-references and give shorter answers when they lie).
This difference in patterning highlights the potential importance of this work, emphasising the notion that professional and highly practised deceivers may emit different signals when lying compared to novice liars.

External resources

Max Maven’s website