A folk taxonomy of magic

Magic tricks provide a uniquely powerful window onto the boundaries of what people consider possible, and the ways in which those boundaries can be challenged. Although there exists an effectively infinite variety of magic tricks, relatively little is known about how different magical effects relate to one another at a psychological level. Previous attempts to classify magic have largely relied on the judgments of a small number of expert magicians, rather than capturing people's intuitive understanding of magical phenomena. Here, we introduce a new multi-dimensional taxonomy of magic that treats the observable effect (e.g., an object vanishing) and the attributed cause (e.g., a magic wand) as independent dimensions. This framework allows a wide range of magic tricks to be systematically described and captures the vast majority of known magical effects. We evaluated the psychological validity of this taxonomy by asking participants to judge the perceived similarity between magic tricks drawn from each category. These similarity judgments were used to construct a dendrogram, revealing a hierarchical structure that reflects how people cognitively organize magical effects. The results corroborate several key distinctions traditionally made by magicians, such as the separation between mental and physical effects, while also revealing more subtle patterns in the perception of magic that have not previously been documented. Together, these findings provide a psychologically grounded framework for understanding how people categorize and experience magical impossibilities.