[QUOTE=olivesmarch4th]
There’s a really interesting book called “Why People Believe Weird Things” by Michael Shermer. In it, he postulates that psychics become psychics not out of maliciousness, but because they had an early hit (correct guess/“prediction”) that resulted in positive feedback (“I thought off you when the phone rang.”/“Wow, how could you know that?”) The person then begins to notice the “hits” and disregard the “misses.” With every “hit” that person becomes more and more confident in their innate psychic abilities, and less and less apt to notice all the misses. (This works both ways–the grieving audiences also notice only the hits and quickly forget the misses.) Very popular and skilled psychics probably learned all those “cold-reading” skills unconsciously – they probably don’t even realize that’s what they are doing, but they continue the behavior because of all the positive feedback that results. Thus it’s possible for someone to be a famous, cold-reading “psychic” and be completely genuine in intention.
Interesting hypothesis anyways.
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I agree with this very strongly - and do so from experience. I have been doing readings for about 5 years now. I am not psychic in any way (nor ever claim to be) and am consciously using cold reading techniques - very much influenced by the SD’s Ianzin’s book, The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading.
I sometimes get hits that are so accurate they scare me. If I were using any ‘real’ system like tarot or astrology, I would soon be convinced they were real. To be totally scientific, I created my own divination system based on cold reading theory. It is called Tauromancy. There is nothing about this system - the props, the method, what I say - which has not come from rational thinking based on the person I am reading - age, gender, general look, and then eventually, feedback. I name people, diseases, all sorts of things. I always get “there is no way you could have known that”. They are right. i didn’t. But I sure make it sound like I did.
Last night I did a reading on a 40 year old woman. She was very casually dressed, no make-up, no jewelry. The first thing she did when she was supposed to be arranging a set of pretty little masks on a mat was to hand one of them to me saying she did not relate to this mask and wanted to reject it. It was the ‘mask of materialsm’. I took out the hand written book I made up to give validity to the system, opened at the page describing that mask which is headed ‘the mask of materialism’ and showed it to her saying only: “This is what you have rejected”. She was so astounded, she was then fully convinced - saying this is exactly true of her. I reinforced the hit she had just acknowledged by pointing out that it isn’t true of the vast majority of people.
Mind you, had she put it on the mat, I would have interpetted it to get a hit as well.
Had this happened when I was a beginner, and in a system which I hadn’t made up myself, then I think I would have been totally convinced. Tracy loved the hour long reading. I felt really special. Yes, Shermer has it spot on. I would have been convinced of my psychic abilities, and loved indentifying with them and the positive feedback.
By the way, I never perform as a psychic, yet with the right lead in, it still works a treat every time. We always debrief afterward.
I could go on about this for ages. After hundreds of readings, instinct and experience just tells me, without conscious thinking, what will work.
Lynne