Ask the (Former) Professional "Psychic"

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

Break the rules of cold reading? Nonsense!

The rules of cold reading are: [ol][li]Throw a lot of stuff out there and hope something sticks.[]Do it again.[]Repeat until the mark makes an “astounding” connection.[*]Bask in the admiration.[/ol][/li]She did, it did, you did, and you marveled, just as expected.

Did you write down all the things she said? A typical cold reading session might have 10 things wrong for every one you remembered as right. And it was probably “right” only after you told her it what it was! Were you aware of how she manipulated you and extracted the answers from you, then turned around and offered them as her own?

How can I be sure that is what happened? I can’t. But I know how easily people who are not magicians overlook what really happened and remember what they think happened!

For an example of such a session with Van Praagh, see this document (PDF), an actual transcript with annotations by me.

Sorry for the hijack, Ensign Edison – I’ll add my compliments to this thread, too, and you might enjoy the Praagh doc.

But I’m not done yet…

So you couldn’t quite connect someone in your life who was a doctor or a teacher at first, so she insisted. Who doesn’t have a doctor or a teacher somewhere in their life? Then she widened the net by suggesting that is person “works for the government,” something not originally given. Had this not triggered something in your mind, she would have suggested something else, then something else. No doctor handy? How about a nurse? Veternarian? Plant doctor? Person in a lab coat? Not close? How about farther away? In the past? Someone else’s past? (When all else fails, the standard fallback line is, “Just wait – it’s in the future!” She can’t lose.) Eventually you would have made a connection, and you, the sucker, will marvel at her ability! You won’t remember how badly she guessed or how much you had to struggle to make it work.

Don’t feel bad. It’s human nature.

Probably the same “accurate” physical description she gives for everyone. You made the match. It’s called the Barnum Effect. (Also see the Forer Effect.) “He was a tall man, but had many short qualities. Fat, but thin at times. He liked people, but often avoided social events…”

See how it works?

42

Well, I went googling and found out that fibrocystic breast disease occurs in 60% of all women, breast cysts occur in 20 to 50% of reproductive-age women during their lifetime, the lifetime incidence of breast cancer is one in eight and eight out of ten breast lumps are benign.

So it isn’t all that unlikely that a random client of a psychic might have a breast lump.

43

I do.

“You often have problems with your kidneys, lungs, circulation or lymph system.”

“No.”

“Your liver?”

“Never.”

“You may have heart problems in the future.”

“The doctor says my heart’s fine.”

“I see an injury somewhere. Ever break any bones?”

“No.”

“You have vision problems, which is why you wear glasses.”

“No, those are just for cosmetic purposes.”

“You are female.”

“No, I’m just a good cross-dresser.”

“I see a lump somewhere in this room. Or the next.”

“Yes! In my right breast! Amazing! How did you know? You really are psychic!”

44

I like Musicat’s answer better than mine. :stuck_out_tongue:

45

Just chiming in to say that for a couple of years, I was getting calls looking for readings. Seems my phone number used to be Kevbo’scity Paranorma Institute. I’d go on for several minutes with patter that would equally apply to anyone, Tell them I sensed they were wonering about a relationship, get lots f feedack on how perceptive I am, then tell them I was pulling it all out of my ass, and they should really, really get a life.

Always pissed them off no end. oh yeah, of probably 75-90 calls (I didn’t count) zero male callers. Not even a gay guy.

So If I have a question for the “psychic” it is why does a psychic think (I’m assuming based on experience) would the overwhelming majority of the callers be female?

46

What, you’ve never heard of “Alice” Cooper? :smiley:

47

I also think this is a fascinating thread, Ensign Edison. While I basically agree with your moral condemnation of your previous line of work, I wonder if you aren’t being a tad too hard on yourself. Most of us will never know the temptations stemming from having a talent for cold reading – and fewer still assiduously will develop it, or choose a career so dependent on it (and those are the choices where the morality is weighed). Any moral comparison between those who can “cold read” and those who basically can’t is essentially pointless, like aesthetically comparing oranges and apples.

If you don’t mind divulging, would you tell us if your talent has affected your personal relationships? Are you in one now? Have others broken up with you for reasons having to do with your capacity for psychological or emotional manipulation? Do some people sense or readily understand this aspect in you, and shy away or quickly reject you for it, even as others may find it fascinating, irresistable, or flattering to their narcissism? Do you find yourself feeling, even against your better judgement, a certain baseline disdain or even pity for those who lack your ability? (Much has been made of “emotional intelligence” as a complement to the traditional “I.Q.” concept. It sounds as if the “E.Q.” of cold-readers might be in the genius range; do you agree? Although some of them might well also be sociopaths, if all they want to do is to manipulate others.)

My guess (oh dear, does this mean I’m cold-reading you?) is that you find first dates (and especially blind dates) akin to a child’s game which you’ve long since aced, but that your moral capacity shrinks from any deliberate application of cold-reading skills to manipulate a date – either to get her to reveal more of herself than she otherwise might, or to enhance your likeability in her eyes. (You want your love, and especially her love, to be real and genuine, and untainted by your cold-reading talents per se, right?)

And yet how can one refuse such a resource in the quest for love? It must be extremely difficult, not to mention tempting, to recognize when one is turning on the charm as if dealing with a mark, when with a date, and stopping it. Do you feel that you’ve maintained a capacity for dealing intimately with others without “dealing” with them as you have with your customers? Or has your talent (and perhaps more to the point, your professional cultivation of it) reshaped what was once an original, authentic personality and ability to relate to others? And if you could choose who you would love, would it be someone who shares your abilities (but let us stipulate, without exploiting others) – or would you rather love and be loved by a person with average perceptive abilities, or even someone who has no capacity for it, as a tone-deaf person lacks a musical prodigy’s perfect pitch?

I apologize in advance if I’ve crossed the line of what you feel comfortable discussing. If I’m out of line, just tell me to piss off… but I hope you won’t.

48

When I say extra sense, I mean not sight, hearing, touch, taste or smell. If someone says “I’m psychic”, they aren’t saying “I’m a good manipulator and I’m very observant”, they’re claiming they have a power that goes beyond ordinary science. (Or at least they’re deliberately deceiveing people into believing this.)

By saying cold reading is psychic power, you seem to be implying that a cold reader who claims to be “psychic” is being honest. They’re not – just as if I claimed to be able to “levitate briefly” but really meant “I can jump abnormally high”, I’d be lying.

What you seem to be saying is that scientists claimed there could be no possible explanation of a cold reader’s performance in terms of ordinary science, and then discovered they were wrong. What I’m saying is that it was the so-called psychics themselves who have claimed their performances couldn’t be explained by mundane physical principles. In general, scientists will always assume an observed phenomenon can be explained in terms of known physical principles (absent overwhelming evidence to the contrary), even if the precise explanation is not yet known.

49

Fun thread.

To the OP, I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself here. Certainly there’s a line where being a psychic get to that really unseemly world of being a con-artist, but I can’t say you’ve entered into it based on the descriptions so far. Part of my reasoning for that is because in comparing the culpability here, the fool is more at fault than you are. Unlike other con games you aren’t actively luring people into this nor are contriving to take more money than you claim. All these people are free to stop giving you money at any point.

In a way I compare it to sports betting. It can be dangerous when handled wrong, but if you look at it from the “for entertainment purposes only” perspective it’s perfectly fine.

I’m a total skeptic and would never believe anything you told me was mystical but at the same time I’d probably find a reading to be a fun little diversion and well worth the $10 I ponied up.

50

The summer fairgrounds usually have one or two booths doing star charts.

So, this is how it used to be when I was a teen:

My pals: “oh, let’s get our stars read!”
Me: “I’ll pass”
Them: “oh but you have to”

(blahblah, we finally go)

One person at the booth asks for somebody’s time and location of birth and writes it down in a questionnary, if you know what day of the week it was they write it down and if not they check it using a universal calendar and write it down; passes it to a partner that starts feeding it into a computer.

At some point, the person filling in the questionary reaches me.

DOB: March, 13, 1968. Wednesday. At this point they look a tad shocked (fer chrissakes, there’s 12 13s in a year, even if only one is in March!)
TOB: 12:47
That’s the point where they refused to go on. They’d finish my friends, but me no way.

So, you would class these people under “they still believe in it”?

(For those who don’t know: 13 is the number of Mars. In Spain, Italy and others it’s Tuesday “Mars’ day” the 13th that’s “bad” since the Romans turned into pacifists, being a day to start wars. So I was born on the day of Mars of the month of Mars, 13 minutes before the 13th hour, and no, it wasn’t the weekday of Mars - it was the weekday of Mercury. :stuck_out_tongue: )

51

I’ll be back to answer some more questions in a bit, but I wanted to get this said. The people complimenting my ‘skill’ or whatever are kind, but their kindness is misplaced. I believe nearly anyone could learn to do what I did, once again because it only requires the knowledge and willingness to exploit basic human tendencies. It’s almost absurdly easy, once you get the hang of it.

If I had a bit of an edge, it was just because I have a freakishly good memory and like to think about people, and neither of those things are special. The last thing I want are any accolades for being ethically screwed up enough to devote time and energy to getting really good at lying to people for money.

52

Look at it this way, Edison…

Both my gramps and my friend David have this same skill. Both of them have turned it into succesful careers in sales.

The difference is that David doesn’t use it to be mean to people. Gramps does.

I’ve seen David steer someone away from a car that had grabbed their attention but which was absolutely NOT what they needed. He isn’t the guy who sells most high-end cars in that dealership, but he is the one that has people coming in and saying “excuse me, which of you is David? My cousin bought his car from him and she’s very happy with it, so I’d like to work with him…” He’s been “salesman of the month” for the country so many times he doesn’t bother count anymore (out loud, those of us who’ve known him since childhood are sure he keeps track).

I think people-reading skills are like knives, it’s all in what you do with it.

53

Thanks for the fascinating OP, Edison.

When I was a teenager, I’d do card readings for fun at parties, mostly to meet girls. I had this routine that was a mixture of Tarot and stuff I’d seen in movies: Cut with your left hand into three stacks. Now place them in a single stack. Pick a single card and lay it face down. Now place three stacks to the left of the single card, and three to the right, using the entire deck. The middle card is the essence of your present . . . yadda yadda yadda.

However, I used hot reading, which was amazingly easy at a party and a whole lot easier than cold reading. You just eavesdropped on conversations and spit back what you heard. The trick during the read was sneaking up on what you wanted to say to make sound more mysterious.

Say you overheard someone say that they just broke up with “David” for still seeing his old girl friend, and, boy, what a jerk he is. This would give you a lot to work with. During the read, I’d say something like “Your present card is the three of clubs [or whatever], which means an interrupted relationship [at least it does for this reading].” You’d then turn over the top cards on each of the three stacks to the left (the “past” cards). “Ah, the seven of spades [or whatever]. This boyfriend, his name started with a D? Daniel? No, it’s David.” And so on and so on.

The thing was, I only got busted once that I remember. Every other person never even considered the fact that I just told them something that they had talked about to someone else in the same room not 30 minutes before. It was an eye-opening lesson in psychology to this fourteen year old (that is, “Most people are suckers.”.

54

Thanks, Musicat, I’m not feeling bad. As I said, I went into it for the entertainment purposes, partly interested in seeing what I could observe that correlated to what I knew of cold reading (not exhaustive, by any means) and partly for the amusement of being carried along for the ride and the enjoyment of “being amazed” by what she could pull out. I enjoy illusionists, too.

I wasn’t entirely clear about what I found interesting, I guess. There would have been no point in her establishing that some random person in my life was a doctor or teacher (fairly common, as you say), which wouldn’t have impressed me at all. Her insistence was that it was someone close to me, and what I found interesting was that she let it go, said some other stuff and then came back to it a couple of times. As I said, she made plenty of wrong guesses which I denied and she quickly dropped. I wanted to get Ensign’s take on why she would come back to this one. What’s the psychology behind that? Suppose there was no one close to me who even faintly resembled one part of that description, much less all three? (Oh, and she didn’t say “government worker,” she said “works for the government” and believe me, anybody in our state employed by the university is acutely aware they are working for the state.)

Also, the examples of the “fishing” process are like some of what she did (which I recognized) and completely unlike the particulars I mentioned that impressed me by their difference. Neither her description of my husband nor her pinpointing of my lump were anything like what has been suggested. She described him as tall, bald and bearded, which was accurate and straightforward. She didn’t fish about my medical stuff at all, she said straight out “you have a lump in your breast here (indicating her own body) but it is not malign.” She moved on swiftly from there.

I did write down as much as I could remember after I got out, but it’s been a few years and I don’t have it with me, as I’m traveling.

There were two other things that were interesting for their oddness. She said that within the next year I would get a new car and “be in a movie.” These were also flat out statements, with no waffling or fishing to determine whether I wanted a new car or was connected to the film industry. I didn’t believe her and filed them under “telling people things you think they want to hear.”

A couple of weeks later, I was sitting in a tea shop that had just opened and a TV crew came in and interviewed people and I was on the evening news. Big whoop, but, for me, unusual and unpredictable, not a thing that has ever happened to me before or since (this was all about five years ago).

A couple of months later, the dealership where we had bought our car called us to say they were looking to get rid of a demo model that was the same as the car we had bought (a station wagon with a manual transmission, which no one else on the planet appears to find desirable) and would we be interested? We went, we drove, we bought. It was not something we would have done on our own initiative.

I don’t consider these evidence of paranormal power - I suppose they are coincidence - but they are not the kind of coincidence I usually observe, so they are more fun to look at. Her combination of fishing around and making startlingly unequivocal statements (some accurate, many not) was not what I expected, and I was wondering if Ensign was familiar with this as style or technique, and what he thought of it.

55

Very cool thread.

Do you want to work for my new ‘psychic readings via e-mail’ internet company?

56

Reading that kind of nonverbal signal is a skill. I say this as someone who has a lot of trouble reading even obvious nonverbal signals. I don’t even really know what might be a signal.

Did you ever get a client like me, whose nonverbal signals are a bit out of whack because they’re so unaware of that sort of thing? What was that reading like, if you did?

57

So you’ve never read for a complete skeptic or been completely called out as wrong, really? The thought of that would have kept me out of the business before the morality of it would, I admit.

Also, a friend once told me she got a reading and the person doing it started out by saying “I can’t read you clearly right now because you’re on your period,” which she was. I didn’t ask whether my friend was padded or not, but what do you think? Had the psychic been imperceptibly staring at her crotch? Noticing some bloating? The thought is mystifying, and quite funny.

58

Sparrowhawk, I think you’re getting the idea. But I don’t think you are thoroughly convinced that psychics work with only guesses and some smart interpretation of human reactions, because you keep bringing up “oddities,” “why did she persist,” etc. that seem unusual to you.

This is a very human trait. Most non-mathematical people are unaware of just how likely “odd coincidences” are. Even mathematical nerds would have a difficult time computing the exact odds of “the letter ‘M’” having some significance somewhere in your life. This relates to the “law of large numbers,” which says that if two very large groups of random things are compared, quite a few will seem to be related.

If you compare each item in a very large random list with every other item in the list, the chances of matches are greater then most people suppose.

Maybe I can try to show by example. Let’s take a very large group of people and have each write down their favorite hobbies. You may find quite a few that share the same hobby. That’s because even tho there are many hobbies in a random population, given a large enough group, the chances of matches are extremely large, not small as most people think. “Amazing coincidences” become highly-probable events when large numbers are involved.

In the case of “the letter ‘M’”, you could find a connection with a person in your family whose name begins with M, has an m in the first, middle or last name, or it could be your Mother, your pet, someone in your circle of friends, or at your job. It wouldn’t have to be a name, either – it could be your hobby, a letter in your hobby…get how this works? It’s a very large list.

As far as why did the psychic persist, why not? Sooner or later you will find a connection, and she will amaze you. You did, and she did.

The mark will struggle mightily and endlessly to make a connection to prove the psychic right, because that’s what they expect and want to happen. With a True Believer, the psychic can’t lose.

Also, unless you videotape the entire session (and pre-session conversations, if any), it is nearly impossible to tell what was said and to whom. The average person is rarely aware of the details that a magician is and tends to forget details that may appear small to the mark, but are the clue to the whole trick. You simply can’t trust your own memory unaided.

If I was able to see the entire event, it’s possible that I might detect some data that would explain stuff that to you is unexplainable, but without that, I can only suggest what happened. This is why a magician is an absolute requirement to be on the staff of any organization that purports to be testing the paranormal.

Let’s take a specific statement of yours:

You say oddities, I say expectations:[ol][li]She may have said many “flat-out statements” that you didn’t remember.[]She didn’t specify a time period for the movie, so your entire life, past (in case you remembered something) or future, is eligible.[]She might have connected something you said off the cuff, like “I hate my old car” with your apparent financial status, and guessed that you would buy a new car soon.[*]It is your interpretation of “Be in a movie” that you stretched to a TV crew (a TV crew does not make movies, they make videos). If someone picked up a camcorder and shot 5 seconds of you falling out a chair, I have no doubt you would feel that qualifies. Were you in the audience of a concert where it was videotaped? Then you were in a “movie”, by your definition, too. You made the connection.[/ol]In short, you think it is impossible for the psychic to guess, but in reality, it is nearly impossible for the psychic to be wrong![/li][quote]
I don’t consider these evidence of paranormal power - I suppose they are coincidence - but they are not the kind of coincidence I usually observe…
[/quote]
Well said!

59

Sotuh Park did a great episode on Johnathan Edwards. He get voted the biggest douche in the universe. Look it up its funny and talks to the ability people have to convince themselves of almost anything they want to believe.Its nonsense.Stop it now.

60

How about the smell? Not to be crude, but body chemistry changes about then; along with the obvious, even armpit sweat gets a little more acrid that week. Also, if someone’s feeling a little delicate, they may walk more slowly or lean forward a bit more. I can tell in the case of my officemates; why shouldn’t someone be able to tell straightaway if they’re better at “reading” than that?