When Performance Isn’t Insight

alicepailhes
Jun 5
4 min read

What magicians reveal about leadership, self-awareness, and the illusion of knowing.

We often equate performance with expertise. A compelling speaker must know how to lead, a confident executive must understand what motivates people, and a charismatic coach must understand psychology — right? Not necessarily. In our recent paper, “Expertise in Magicians – Testing the Insight Hypothesis”, we studied magicians — masters of attention, deception, and performance — to test a simple question with big implications:

Does being good at something mean you understand why you’re good at it?

The Insight Hypothesis

The insight hypothesis suggests that magicians gain deep psychological understanding just by performing and observing audience reactions. It assumes that experience, over time, creates intuitive mastery of human cognition — attention, memory, decision-making.

This mirrors common assumptions in leadership:

That years of leading teams = insight into team dynamics.
That success in coaching = understanding of human behavior.
That positive reactions = validation of strategy.

Our research challenges this.

What We Found

We ran three studies with professional magicians and non-magicians. We asked them to:

Reflect on what they believe makes them effective.
Predict what tricks people would find most impressive.
Judge how laypeople perceive the methods behind tricks.

Across the board, we found that:

🎭 Magicians misjudge which effects resonate most with audiences.
🧠 Their predictions about audience responses often don’t align with reality.
👂 They rely heavily on ambiguous feedback (applause, laughter, surprise) — which feels like insight, but isn’t always diagnostic.

What This Means for Leaders and Coaches

Magicians aren’t the only ones relying on flawed feedback loops. In leadership, the illusion of insight is common — and costly.

1. The Illusion of Transparency

People tend to assume others see them as they see themselves (Gilovich et al., 1998). Leaders may believe their messages are clear or inspiring, while team members feel confused or overlooked. Like magicians, they’re often blind to the mismatch.

2. Confirmation Bias

We look for evidence that confirms what we already believe. A round of applause (or a good quarterly result) might reinforce a leader’s confidence — even if the outcome had little to do with their actions.

3. Ambiguous Feedback and Attribution Errors

When leaders receive vague positive signals (e.g., “Great meeting today!”), they may attribute success to strategy, charisma, or leadership style — rather than, say, timing, novelty, or context.

4. Experience ≠ Expertise

Psychologist David Dunning notes that experience alone doesn’t inoculate us against error — especially when feedback is weak or misleading. True expertise requires calibrated self-awareness, not just repetition.

How to Build Real Insight

So how can we move from performance to understanding?

✅ Ask for specific feedback, not polite noise.

Most leaders get feedback like: “Great talk!” “That was inspiring.” “Really helpful, thank you.”Lovely? Yes. Useful? Not really.

Instead, invite specificity:

What stood out to you the most?
What felt unclear or less helpful?
Was there anything you disagreed with, or would’ve liked more of?

When you normalize this kind of feedback, people become less afraid to be honest, and you become better at decoding what actually worked, and what just looked shiny.

✅ Bring in external observers, your own audience analysts.

Magicians can use “lay spectators” to try out tricks before a show. Leaders need the same.

Coaches, facilitators, or even trusted peers can catch things you’re blind to:

Your habit of answering your own questions.
That subtle moment when energy dropped.
A gesture or phrase that landed awkwardly.

Think of them as your backstage crew for clarity.

✅ Don’t just ask “What worked?” — ask “Why?”

One of the easiest traps is assuming causality:The room was engaged, so my leadership style must be working.

But... was it your message, your energy, the timing, or the donuts?

Start testing assumptions with humility.For example:

What motivates your team right now?
Do they value challenge, autonomy, clarity, recognition?
Have you asked them lately — or are you just guessing based on old scripts?

The longer you’ve worked with someone, the more dangerous your assumptions might be.

✅ Be open to being wrong

Both magicians and leaders share this strange irony: The more successful you become, the less feedback you receive. People stop questioning you, and you stop questioning yourself.

Which is why humility is not a sign of weakness, it’s a competitive advantage. Being open to being wrong is smart. It’s how you keep growing when everyone else is coasting on applause.

The magician on stage and the leader in the boardroom aren’t so different. Both craft experiences, command attention, and both are vulnerable to the same illusion: That applause means understanding and mastery of performance means mastery of minds. But real insight requires more than intuition. It takes reflection, feedback, and the courage to look past the spotlight and into the mirror.

🪞Insight starts with doubt.

Curious about the full study? It’s open-access here: http://dx.doi.org/10.5920/jpm.1576

🔖 References

Kuhn, G., Pailhès, A., & Cole, G. (2025). Expertise in magicians – testing the insight hypothesis. Journal of Performance Magic, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.5920/jpm.1576
Gilovich, T., Savitsky, K., & Medvec, V. H. (1998). The illusion of transparency: Biased assessments of others’ ability to read one’s emotional states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(2), 332–346.
Dunning, D. (2011). The Dunning–Kruger effect: On being ignorant of one’s own ignorance. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 44, pp. 247–296). Academic Press.
Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175–220.