Yes, we’re all close minded and insecure because we refuse to believe it was a portent, and not just a coincidence.
No, the author had several controls for cold reading. And the idea that people just want to believe it and are willing to lie to themselves is an assumption, not a fact.
In one situation the people didn’t respond. In others there were only 5 questions but still a large amount of information was gained. So I don’t think cold reading can explain that kind of thing.
http://www.openmindsciences.com/hbo-exp.htm
Its actually a pretty interesting book.
Perhaps I don’t explain myself well. I do not believe that psychic powers exist. I do believe that some people who claim to be psychic are extremely skilled at guessing what is going on, popular names, watching human body language etc.
The programme I’m talking about ‘Sensing Murder’ shows people who call themselves ‘psychics’ helping the police - so, yes, I do know of some cases where they have helped the police. Just what that ‘help’ consisted of, needs explaining. They seem to come up with some suggestions that police are willing to investigate, such as a street name or a person’s description etc. This hasn’t lead to the arrest of anyone (that I am aware of), however, it has helped with the general picture of what may have happened, where and to whom. This is through police investigation, not through psychics telling them what happened.
Yes – but the police detectives themselves are much better trained and experienced in the same kind of observation. What use would outside help from an amateur be to them?
If I have understood the question, you are asking ‘Are there people who at one point in time acted as ‘psychics’ or claimed ‘psychic’ ability, and who subsequently admitted that in they did not have any psychic ability.’
Answer, yes.
See the above link to M Lamarr Keane and ‘The Psychic Mafia’. Good place to start.
The whole spiritualism industry was started by the Fox sisters. At least one of them confessed in later life that it was all a con. Google is your friend.
Also check out the tale of James Hydrick. Posed as a psychic superstar for a while. Had some ‘new’ tricks. Was exposed. Admitted it was all a con.
Read Adventures of a Parapsychologist by Susan Blackmoore. She started doing readings at university. People told her she was realy good, spookily accurate. She eventually realised she was not psychic, and was just someone who had picked up the art of cold reading naturally, like some pianists learn to play by ear.
So, yes, there are a few examples here and there. Not many though, and for various reasons. People acting as ‘psychics’ either sincerely believe they really are psychic, or they are knowing con artists. The former aren’t going to ‘admit’ they aren’t psychic, obviously, and the latter generally keep the schtick going for as long as it pays well and seldom decide to quit and admit it was all a sham (there may be legal repercussions of doing so). Also, the media are more interested in people who supposedly do have psychic powers than anyone admitting they don’t. “I’m not psychic” is a sort of dog-bites-man story… not much media interest.
This thread is getting derailed a bit by people addressing an entirely different question from the one posed in the OP, viz. are there any people with genuine psychic powers? It seems needless to add that this isn’t a question that it is going to get settled here in one thread. The debate has been going on a long time, and it’s going to end any time soon. Skeptics say no, believers say yes. I’ll tell you the truth, based on my rather intimate relationship with this whole question these past 25 years or more. When you ask ‘are psychic powers real’, it’s not the same as asking whether the White House is real or whether rice pudding is real… because these are things that can be settled by evidence and fact-finding. It’s a question of belief, not evidence. It comes down to a very simple observation: psychic powers are as real as you want them to be. If you want them to be real, you snuggle up with and enjoy the evidence that is consistent with your belief, and ignore the rest. Anything that doesn’t ‘fit’, you just blanket out and ignore. Just like religious people do with their particular adopted form of the mind virus known as ‘god’.
I’m not so sure about that. Someone who has studied human behaviour for many years as ‘a psychic’ could potentially be more observant, knowledgeable and experienced than a police officer who has been doing it for a few years or more.
Thanks Ianzin.
Forgot to add, especially if their credibility and monetary reward depends on their observations.
OK, so what were the controls? How exactly was this shown to be different than cold reading?
You are correct in that this experiment doesn’t prove that ‘people just want to believe it’, but the experiment doesn’t rule it out either (unless, as I said, there were controls involved that I don’t know about). Given that we know cold reading works, and haven’t seen anything that can only be explained by true psychic powers, it seems logical to assume cold reading is working in this case, too.
Look, we all fool ourselves at times (I know that I’m only human), and it’s a lot easier when you’re greiving and in pain like these sitters.
And you know it’s not like it would be that hard eliminate a lot of the self-scoring bias. Don’t let the sitters hear the readers’ statements, and don’t let the sitters respond at all (even hearing the sitter’s voice gives the reader a lot of clues about age, sex, economic background, etc.) Then write the readers’ statements down, mixed randomly with the readers’ statements about other sitters. Have the sitters score them for accuracy without telling the sitters which ones are which. Now if the sitters score the statements about them higher than statements about others, that indicates it’s not just the sitters wanting to believe.
Or, if you want to allow interaction between the sitter and reader, just use half psychics and half acknowledged non-psychic cold readers (with some controls to make sure the experimenters presented them both the same). If the psychics do better consistently, then maybe there’s something to it (remember, they’ll do better half the time just by chance).
That is a good idea. In the book the author talks about how a skeptic made a TV special about his methods by using cold reading and implying that cold reading was just as effective as what they were doing. The author then tried to contact the magician to try to get him into a lab to see if he could replicate his finding and the magician wouldn’t respond. However if he were willing that would be an interesting research program.
http://skepdic.com/essays/gsandsv.html
http://www.enformy.com/Gary-reHymanReview.htm
Schwartz talks a bit about subjective validation and cold reading in that article. I read the book over a year ago so I can’t remember what all controls there were for subjective validation. As far as subjective validation the readings generally involved more detailed information rather than generic astrological information, so subjective validation wouldn’t be as pronounced with detailed info. I’ll have to check the book out again to see how he tried to control for it.
First, IMO phrases like ‘insidious meme’ are better than “mind virus”
Second, this thread is in GQ not GD.
I like “true believer syndrome”
Yes it is. Point? A question was asked. I gave the best factual answer I could, and I have some relevant first-hand experience to offer.
By the way, I’m one of the people who has given a TV demo of cold reading and then been invited by the good Dr. Schwarz to take part in experiments in his lab. I declined the invitation.
Can I ask why you declined his invitation?
So it was you they were referring to in the book? Why did you decline the offer?
I don’t mean to hijack this thread, but two people have asked why I declined the invitation I received from Dr. Schwarz. (By the way, Wesley Clark, I don’t know if I am the person that was referred to in your source… I’m not the only person to have demonstrated CR on TV, and I’m not the only person to have received Dr. Schwarz’s invitation.)
The answer is that the best opinion I was able to form at the time (November 2003) was that there was no reason at all to have anything to do with Dr. Schwarz.
At the time, Dr. Schwarz maintained that his research had produced strong evidence for survival after death, obtained via laboratory experiments using ‘genuine’ psychics who didn’t cheat or use cold reading. The best opinion I could form at the time was that he hadn’t produced evidence of anything at all except his own desire to see such results; that his experimental protocols were not good; that the people whom he considered to have ‘genuine’ psychic gifts did not have such gifts; and that the possibility of cheating or cold reading could not be ruled out. Just for necessary clarity here, let me stress that this was my opinion. It’s possible I was wrong at the time and that I’m still wrong now.
Given that this was my opinion, I felt it would be difficult for Dr. Schwarz and I to start from the same page, or agree on anything concerning what my participation should consist of, and how my participation might be scored or evaluated.
I also felt that I was being asked to demonstrate something that I didn’t claim I could do anyway. At the time of my TV demonstration, there was at least one prominent TV ‘psychic’ who was creating quite a stir with his apparent demonstrations of relaying messages from the dead. Some people looked at these TV shows and concluded that his work constituted good evidence of survival after death. The point of my demonstration (for an ABC ‘Primetime’ Hallowe’en Special Report) was to show that this was not necessarily the case, and that someone using pure cold reading with total strangers in a TV studio setting could garner results that were of similar ‘quality’ and cogency, for want of a better word. In other words, to encourage a healthy degree of critical thinking and evaluation, and to understand that there are possible alternatives to the ‘Oh my gosh, heaven must be real’ conclusion.
In contrast, Dr. Schwarz’s approach was along these lines: he devises a test of my cold reading ability, I participate from home, and then he judges whether I’ve done as well as some of the supposedly ‘genuine’ psychics that he has already tested, and whose performances formed the basis for some of his published research. This isn’t the same thing at all, and not something I had ever claimed I could or would be able to do. And since it was my opinion at the time that the experiments he had run did not, in fact, support the conclusion he had advanced in his published work, I felt it was something of a fool’s errand to try and deliver results that were ‘equally good’. Equally good as what?
Another factor was that I simply didn’t want to. Basically, I’m just an entertainer. I like to go on stage and give people some fun and entertainment with my brand of ‘mind magic’, and I hope that maybe they’ll find some of it thought-provoking too. I’m not really all that interested in trying to prove anything to anyone or get bogged down in academic research. Life is too short. There’s too much to love and enjoy and see and do to waste time in ‘tests’ that weren’t going to achieve anything at all.
One final factor… there was no money or compensation offered for my participation. That’s fine if you have an academic ‘ivory tower’ grant to do your research on people talking to the dead. Some of us have to actually earn a living.
I sat next to this psychic on a plane last week. She was very interesting, highly intelligent and probably only a little nutty. She mentioned that she’s going to be a part of a “reality” show on SciFi starting in June called “The Gift”. From what I could tell, there will be a group of wannabe psychics whose powers are judged by those with “real” psychic abilities.
She also gave me 2 predictions. She expects a big southern California earthquake this year. As for the other, I’m hesitant to post it but let’s just say that she has a very famous former politician in the celebrity death pool.
My favorite example of it is when a “psychic”, who has just done a very insightful reading on a person, reveals that it was just a cold reading, and the reaction is not to realize that other psychics might be phony, but rather to proclaim that the fake psychic must, in fact, have real psychic powers and just be unaware of them. The power of the human mind to rationalize tightly held beliefs in the face of irrefutable evidence to the contrary knows no bounds.
Upon reflection and after reading through this thread, I guess what I really wanted to know is if there have been people who really thought they could talk to the dead etc, and then realise that they couldn’t. I’m guessing not many if any, but they potentially could have more insight into ‘psychic powers’ than someone who knows it’s a method.
Why would they have more insight? If they used cold-reading etc for years without realizing it, and attributed their successes to psychic powers, then wouldn’t they have less insight?
Not if they came to realise they didn’t have special powers and they weren’t talking to the dead, just highly skilled.