Richard Dawkins, in his book "Magic of Reality," distinguished three kinds of magic: supernatural magic, stage magic, and poetic magic. The latter, he defines as things that move us to tears; magical performance, scenery, and basically: things that are real. Real things become magic when we look deeper at them and start to ask why. For example, the blue moon butterfly, pictured above, that my partner and I found in Baluran National Park last year. I took a picture of it simply because it was beautiful and landed near me. But recently, I read that this butterfly has been just a case of "flash evolution" in Savai'i island, where it brings back its male population to balance after its significant drop due to the Wolbachia parasite. I call it flash because, at the beginning of 2016, 99% of the blue moon butterfly population were females, but at the end of the year, males made up 40%.

In his book's examples, Dawkins gave explanations for various things, mostly about natural phenomena. He started almost all the chapters with a myth about things, then he debunks it with science. I am easy to fall in awe of people who can popularize science easily. That is, science has the aim to explain things that we don't understand; the "we" does not only refer to "scientists." It also refers to common people, or maybe, people, who learn another thing that "we" do not learn. So it is always amazing for me every time I meet people who are doing it or have done it. The video above is an official MV for "Wildfire" from Seafret, which depicts a classical experiment from Arthur Aron, a psychologist who proves that by asking 36 questions that go from common things to more personal as those go, we can even fall in love with a stranger. Seafret MV is more interesting to see than reading the paper, of course (though I am not suggesting you only see the MV if you want to understand the experiment correctly), and at least can make people to google about the experiment.

And I found what Arthur Aron said in his video: "The culture of Social Psychology is finding the topic that people think can't be studied scientifically and doing it scientifically."

Then comes the magic!

Every day I sit in my chair in the class (or in front of Youtube), listening to a professor talking about social psychology, I feel magic. The magic explains silly things around me, or things that made me mad, or break up with an ex. But I think the most classic magic in social psychology is conformity, which was brought to the surface by Solomon Asch, proving that people in a group could choose the wrong answer for the sake of following other people, even when the wrong answer was obviously wrong to the participant's eyes. The reality becomes two; the real reality and social reality.