Overview

Originally published in 1887 by researcher Richard Hodgson and amateur magician Samuel John Davey, The Mal-Observation Report is a classic of psychical research that remains startlingly relevant to modern psychology. This 292-page volume brings together two seminal papers that revealed how performance magic methods can be used to reveal surprising limits and eccentricities of human minds. In ""The Possibilities of Mal-Observation and Lapse of Memory from a Practical Point of View"" and ""Mr. Davey's Imitations by Conjuring of Phenomena Sometimes Attributed to Spirit Agency,"" Hodgson and Davey described a series of carefully staged fake séances designed to simulate the alleged wonders of the Spiritualist movement-phenomena such as ""independent slate writing."" Their unsuspecting participants, asked to describe what they had witnessed, consistently misremembered, omitted, or invented details, showing how easily simple deceptions can lead people to form false beliefs about their extraordinary experiences. Their results were so controversial that Hodgson later issued a follow-up clarification in 1892, detailing the conjuring methods used in the experiments to reassure readers that no supernatural forces had been involved. Together, these papers form a fascinating early example of an experiment on the psychology of illusion, anticipating concepts like inattentional blindness and reconstructive memory decades before modern psychology gave them names. This new edition features several historical images and a lengthy foreword by magician and experimental psychologist Dr. Matthew L. Tompkins, who situates Hodgson and Davey's work within the growing field of cognitive science. Tompkins draws connections between their 19th-century experiments and his own psychological research using magic to explore human attention, awareness, and belief-reminding readers that the same tricks that fooled audiences in the 1880s remain just as effective today.

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Reviews

Matthew Tompkins has performed a great service for experimental psychologists and, indeed, for all curious minds by drawing attention to these two papers, largely forgotten gems from the early days of psychical research. As his Foreword clearly spells out, Richard Hodgson and S. J. Davey's investigations of recall for faked séances foreshadowed psychological insights into the nature of perception and memory that were not fully appreciated by the scientific community until around a century later. Full recognition of the significance of this groundbreaking work is long overdue. Prof. Christopher French, Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Founder of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London, Author of The Science of Weird Shit (MIT Press, 2024)

Author Information

Richard Hodgson (1855-1905) was an Australian-born psychical researcher and key figure in the early Society for Psychical Research, known for his investigations of spiritualist claims and his pioneering studies on illusion, deception, and human perception. Dr. Matthew L. Tompkins is currently a researcher at the Choice Blindness Lab at Lund University's Department of Cognitive Science, where he applies techniques drawn from mentalism and performance magic to study how people perceive-and mis-perceive-emerging technologies in neuroscience and artificial intelligence. A semi-professional magician, he earned his DPhil in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford, where his doctoral work, Observations on Invisibility, explored historical the historical and contemporary relationships between magicians and scientific researchers.

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