One of my teachers was also a third rate amateur magician. He would go into classes and perform tricks, pretending to have supernatural abilities. He would invariably get over half believing that at least some of what he did was supernatural, and when he did his act well (which greatly involved the nonsense stated to support the tricks, not simply how well the tricks went) he got more than 90% believing he did supernatural things. Afterwards, he would reveal that it was all tricks, and that nothing was supernatural. Students wanted to know how the tricks were done, but he refused to explain most of them, but would explain one or two of them.

This was not in California, nor even within a 1000 miles of California.

I am convinced that, if done properly, one would typically get over half of a class believing such nonsense, as most people have minds filled with rubbish and are not good at distinguishing between good evidence and foolishness. Indeed, most people seem to reject, on principle, the idea that one should believe things only when they actually have good or real evidence for the belief.


If your story is right, it is exceedingly depressing that telling the students the truth beforehand did not prevent most of them from believing stupidly. That is enough to drive one to despair of most people.

This is also quite depressing:



In the real world, there are always going to be some more tricks to be explained, so that if one needs each and every trick explained in order to not believe like a damned fool, one will believe like a damned fool.

Sounds like this guy, i cant remember what programe he did, but he went to America and went to some 'churches' who used some of his 'tricks' and showed them his 'powers' and they all wanted to recriut him but he then exposed them as the frauds he knew they were.
Derren Brown - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia