Cold reading is a set of techniques used by mentalists,
psychics, fortune-tellers, mediums, illusionists (readers), and scam artists to
imply that the reader knows much more about the person than the reader actually
does. Without prior knowledge, a practiced cold-reader can quickly obtain a
great deal of information by analyzing the person's body language, age, clothing
or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity,
level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. Cold readings
commonly employ high-probability guesses, quickly picking up on signals as to
whether their guesses are in the right direction or not, then emphasizing and
reinforcing chance connections and quickly moving on from missed guesses.
Psychologists believe that this appears to work because of the Forer effect (see
below) or confirmation biases (see further below) within people.
Before starting the actual reading, the reader will typically try to elicit cooperation from the subject, saying something such as, "I often see images that are a bit unclear and which may sometimes mean more to you than to me; if you help, we can together uncover new things about you." One of the most crucial elements of a convincing cold reading is a subject eager to make connections or reinterpret vague statements in any way that will help the reader appear to make specific predictions or intuitions. While the reader will do most of the talking, it is the subject who provides the meaning.
After determining that the subject is cooperative, the reader will make a number of probing statements or questions, typically using variations of the methods noted below. The subject will then reveal further information with their replies (whether verbal or non-verbal) and the cold reader can continue from there, pursuing promising lines of inquiry and quickly abandoning or avoiding unproductive ones. In general, while revelations seem to come from the reader, most of the facts and statements come from the subject, which are then refined and restated by the reader so as to reinforce the idea that the reader got something correct.
Subtle cues such as changes in facial expression or body language can indicate whether a particular line of questioning is effective or not. Combining the techniques of cold reading with information obtained covertly (also called "hot reading") can leave a strong impression that the reader knows or has access to a great deal of information about the subject. Because the majority of time during a reading is spent dwelling on the "hits" the reader obtains, while the time spent recognizing "misses" is minimized, the effect gives an impression that the cold reader knows far more about the subject than an ordinary stranger could.
James Underdown from Center for Inquiry and Independent Investigations Group said, "In the context of a studio audience full of people, cold reading is not very impressive." Underdown explains cold-reading from a mathematical viewpoint. A typical studio audience consists of approximately 200 people, divided up into three sections. A conservative estimate assumes each person knows 150 people. Underdown says:
This means that when John Edward or James Van Praagh asks the question "Who's Margaret?" he is hoping there is a Margaret in the 10,000 people in the database of that section. If there is no answer, they open the question up to the whole audience's database of over 30,000 people! Would it be surprising for there to be a dozen Margarets in such a large sample?
Mentalist Mark Edward relates from personal experience as a "psychic performer" how powerful a hit can be when someone in a large audience "claims" a phrase such as a "clown in a graveyard" statement. Edward describes a mental image of a clown placing flowers on graves and adds, "Does that mean anything to someone?" whereupon a woman stands up and claims that he is speaking directly to her. She remembers it as Edward specifically stating that she knew a man who dressed as a clown and placed flowers on graves in her hometown. Edward reports that it took some convincing to get her to understand that he was not directly talking to her, but had thrown the statement out to the entire audience of 300 people. She made the connection, and because it seemed so personal and the situation so odd she felt that he was talking to her directly.
The Forer effect relies in part on the eagerness of people to fill in details and make connections between what is said and some aspect of their own lives, often searching their entire life's history to find some connection, or reinterpreting statements in a number of different possible ways so as to make it apply to themselves.
"Barnum statements", named after P. T. Barnum, the American showman, are statements that seem personal, yet apply to many people. And while seemingly specific, such statements are often open-ended or give the reader the maximum amount of "wiggle room" in a reading. They are designed to elicit identifying responses from people. The statements can then be developed into longer and more sophisticated paragraphs and seem to reveal great amounts of detail about a person. A talented and charismatic reader can sometimes even bully a subject into admitting a connection, demanding over and over that they acknowledge a particular statement as having some relevance and maintaining that they are just not thinking hard enough, or are repressing some important memory.
Statements of this type might include:
Regarding the last statement, if the subject is old enough, his or her father is quite likely to have died, and this statement would easily apply to a large number of medical conditions. The list includes: heart disease, pneumonia, diabetes, emphysema, cirrhosis of the liver, renal failure, most types of cancer, and, for that matter, to any cause of death in which cardiac arrest precedes death, or damage to the brainstem responsible for cardiopulmonary function.
Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Confirmation bias is a variation of the more general tendency of apophenia (the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. Apophenia has come to imply a universal human tendency to seek patterns in random information, such as gambling.)
People also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).
A series of psychological experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased toward confirming their existing beliefs. Later work re-interpreted these results as a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring alternatives. In certain situations, this tendency can bias people's conclusions. Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Another explanation is that people show confirmation bias because they are weighing up the costs of being wrong, rather than investigating in a neutral, scientific way. However, even scientists can be prone to confirmation bias.
Confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Poor decisions due to these biases have been found in political and organizational contexts.
…. Biases in belief interpretation are persistent, regardless of intelligence level.
…. One study showed how selective memory can maintain belief in extrasensory perception (ESP). Believers and disbelievers were each shown descriptions of ESP experiments. Half of each group were told that the experimental results supported the existence of ESP, while the others were told they did not. In a subsequent test, participants recalled the material accurately, apart from believers who had read the non-supportive evidence. This group remembered significantly less information and some of them incorrectly remembered the results as supporting ESP.
Basic Procedure
Before starting the actual reading, the reader will typically try to elicit cooperation from the subject, saying something such as, "I often see images that are a bit unclear and which may sometimes mean more to you than to me; if you help, we can together uncover new things about you." One of the most crucial elements of a convincing cold reading is a subject eager to make connections or reinterpret vague statements in any way that will help the reader appear to make specific predictions or intuitions. While the reader will do most of the talking, it is the subject who provides the meaning.
After determining that the subject is cooperative, the reader will make a number of probing statements or questions, typically using variations of the methods noted below. The subject will then reveal further information with their replies (whether verbal or non-verbal) and the cold reader can continue from there, pursuing promising lines of inquiry and quickly abandoning or avoiding unproductive ones. In general, while revelations seem to come from the reader, most of the facts and statements come from the subject, which are then refined and restated by the reader so as to reinforce the idea that the reader got something correct.
Subtle cues such as changes in facial expression or body language can indicate whether a particular line of questioning is effective or not. Combining the techniques of cold reading with information obtained covertly (also called "hot reading") can leave a strong impression that the reader knows or has access to a great deal of information about the subject. Because the majority of time during a reading is spent dwelling on the "hits" the reader obtains, while the time spent recognizing "misses" is minimized, the effect gives an impression that the cold reader knows far more about the subject than an ordinary stranger could.
James Underdown from Center for Inquiry and Independent Investigations Group said, "In the context of a studio audience full of people, cold reading is not very impressive." Underdown explains cold-reading from a mathematical viewpoint. A typical studio audience consists of approximately 200 people, divided up into three sections. A conservative estimate assumes each person knows 150 people. Underdown says:
This means that when John Edward or James Van Praagh asks the question "Who's Margaret?" he is hoping there is a Margaret in the 10,000 people in the database of that section. If there is no answer, they open the question up to the whole audience's database of over 30,000 people! Would it be surprising for there to be a dozen Margarets in such a large sample?
Mentalist Mark Edward relates from personal experience as a "psychic performer" how powerful a hit can be when someone in a large audience "claims" a phrase such as a "clown in a graveyard" statement. Edward describes a mental image of a clown placing flowers on graves and adds, "Does that mean anything to someone?" whereupon a woman stands up and claims that he is speaking directly to her. She remembers it as Edward specifically stating that she knew a man who dressed as a clown and placed flowers on graves in her hometown. Edward reports that it took some convincing to get her to understand that he was not directly talking to her, but had thrown the statement out to the entire audience of 300 people. She made the connection, and because it seemed so personal and the situation so odd she felt that he was talking to her directly.
The Forer Effect (Barnum
Statements)
The Forer effect relies in part on the eagerness of people to fill in details and make connections between what is said and some aspect of their own lives, often searching their entire life's history to find some connection, or reinterpreting statements in a number of different possible ways so as to make it apply to themselves.
"Barnum statements", named after P. T. Barnum, the American showman, are statements that seem personal, yet apply to many people. And while seemingly specific, such statements are often open-ended or give the reader the maximum amount of "wiggle room" in a reading. They are designed to elicit identifying responses from people. The statements can then be developed into longer and more sophisticated paragraphs and seem to reveal great amounts of detail about a person. A talented and charismatic reader can sometimes even bully a subject into admitting a connection, demanding over and over that they acknowledge a particular statement as having some relevance and maintaining that they are just not thinking hard enough, or are repressing some important memory.
Statements of this type might include:
- "I sense that you are sometimes
insecure, especially with people you don't know very well."
- "You have a box of old unsorted
photographs in your house."
- "You had an accident when you were a
child involving water."
- "You're having problems with a friend or
relative."
- "Your father passed on due to problems
in his chest or abdomen."
Regarding the last statement, if the subject is old enough, his or her father is quite likely to have died, and this statement would easily apply to a large number of medical conditions. The list includes: heart disease, pneumonia, diabetes, emphysema, cirrhosis of the liver, renal failure, most types of cancer, and, for that matter, to any cause of death in which cardiac arrest precedes death, or damage to the brainstem responsible for cardiopulmonary function.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Confirmation bias is a variation of the more general tendency of apophenia (the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. Apophenia has come to imply a universal human tendency to seek patterns in random information, such as gambling.)
People also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).
A series of psychological experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased toward confirming their existing beliefs. Later work re-interpreted these results as a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring alternatives. In certain situations, this tendency can bias people's conclusions. Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Another explanation is that people show confirmation bias because they are weighing up the costs of being wrong, rather than investigating in a neutral, scientific way. However, even scientists can be prone to confirmation bias.
Confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Poor decisions due to these biases have been found in political and organizational contexts.
…. Biases in belief interpretation are persistent, regardless of intelligence level.
…. One study showed how selective memory can maintain belief in extrasensory perception (ESP). Believers and disbelievers were each shown descriptions of ESP experiments. Half of each group were told that the experimental results supported the existence of ESP, while the others were told they did not. In a subsequent test, participants recalled the material accurately, apart from believers who had read the non-supportive evidence. This group remembered significantly less information and some of them incorrectly remembered the results as supporting ESP.
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