I am doing a project on how misdirection effects people (Not Magicians) everyday. Where do we see misdirection in our daily lives?
How Does misdirection effect people?
- Thread starter raccoonfight
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Every time a politician dodges a question by bringing up something totally unrelated.
Or in theatre when stage actors "throw focus" to someone else - when they stand so that they're pointing at the character on whom attention should be focussed, when they are still and in profile to draw attention to the actor facing the audience and in motion, when they move upstage to allow the audience to focus on the actor downstage, when they move out of the lighting to allow greater focus on the actors that are well lit, that sort of thing.
On screen, a shallow depth of field will be used to throw focus; when the shot is such that the nearest object is in tight focus while the rest of the shot is blurry - this for instance
Misdirection is used everywhere. The biggest industry, after magic, to rely on it would be advertising. Advertising is all about hiding flaws and focusing on how a product is better. Similarly, anything that has an argumentative nature: Be it A conversation with your girlfriend or an international debate, it is all about focused research where you make the audience to focus on one side's strengths and others' weaknesses.
Also. remember you will get a load of content by looking up:
Milgrim's deception experiment
Stanford prison experiment
Also. remember you will get a load of content by looking up:
Milgrim's deception experiment
Stanford prison experiment
Misdirection is about distraction, About redirecting, About attention grabbing. You see it mostly everyday and everwhere. When you talk with your girl friend(and there is another pretty girl behind you walk by) you do not make a eye contact for a few second right? 
admit it
admit it 
I'm not claiming to be an expert by any means. I do study this a lot both in and outside of college, so I hope I can help you.
You need to come up with a way of defining "misdirection", in terms of an operational definition. There's two categories you can place it into - psychological and physical.
Now assuming we're taking a shallow look at the concept of misdirection, we can talk a little about focus and the brain.
Your brain can hold 7 (+ or - 2) things in your working memory at any given time. How we define these "things" it's holding is a debate in and of itself. Most of the time people are consuming their working memory with their environment and their behavior. So you've filled up a couple of spots already. The more distracting the environment, the more slots are filled. The more they have to socially or pragmatically manage, the more slots.
Once all these slots are filled, we take in almost no information in real time, and our automatic processes take over. Ever seen someone so consumed in their phone or thoughts they walk into the the pole in front of them? Like that.
Or when people are learning new information, they assume things their brain marks as "given". Most people won't notice the two "the"s in the previous example.
Our brains assume how a sentence is going to octopus. It would be impossible for us to exist without these quirks. These aren't faults, they're survival traits.
Now our focus is different. Your brain makes up about 90% of your day. Just a total bluff. Stay with me.
An easy way to test this is to take a marker and draw a 3ft arc across a white board or a wall. Try to smoothly follow the line with your eyes.
You'll notice your eyes can't move in a smooth motion, they jump from one spot to another.
Combine this with the fact that you're basically blind outside of the fovea in your eye.
(For those who don't know, extend your arm with your thumb up. Your "perfect vision" is about the size of your thumbnailx2)
SO, your eyes jump and you don't see much to begin with. Well that means your brain is filling in the space your eyes jump with relevant data. Kind of like the healing brush in photoshop.
Our brains do this all day with our blind spot anyway.
Thus as you look around, your average day is a patched together string of focus points your brain has basically filled in the majority of.
That's a lot of information and is still VERY surface level. Thank you for reading. If you have questions I'll try to answer them here.
You need to come up with a way of defining "misdirection", in terms of an operational definition. There's two categories you can place it into - psychological and physical.
Now assuming we're taking a shallow look at the concept of misdirection, we can talk a little about focus and the brain.
Your brain can hold 7 (+ or - 2) things in your working memory at any given time. How we define these "things" it's holding is a debate in and of itself. Most of the time people are consuming their working memory with their environment and their behavior. So you've filled up a couple of spots already. The more distracting the environment, the more slots are filled. The more they have to socially or pragmatically manage, the more slots.
Once all these slots are filled, we take in almost no information in real time, and our automatic processes take over. Ever seen someone so consumed in their phone or thoughts they walk into the the pole in front of them? Like that.
Or when people are learning new information, they assume things their brain marks as "given". Most people won't notice the two "the"s in the previous example.
Our brains assume how a sentence is going to octopus. It would be impossible for us to exist without these quirks. These aren't faults, they're survival traits.
Now our focus is different. Your brain makes up about 90% of your day. Just a total bluff. Stay with me.
An easy way to test this is to take a marker and draw a 3ft arc across a white board or a wall. Try to smoothly follow the line with your eyes.
You'll notice your eyes can't move in a smooth motion, they jump from one spot to another.
Combine this with the fact that you're basically blind outside of the fovea in your eye.
(For those who don't know, extend your arm with your thumb up. Your "perfect vision" is about the size of your thumbnailx2)
SO, your eyes jump and you don't see much to begin with. Well that means your brain is filling in the space your eyes jump with relevant data. Kind of like the healing brush in photoshop.
Our brains do this all day with our blind spot anyway.
Thus as you look around, your average day is a patched together string of focus points your brain has basically filled in the majority of.
That's a lot of information and is still VERY surface level. Thank you for reading. If you have questions I'll try to answer them here.