What is 'cold reading' and how is the technique used in practice by mediums and similar practitioners? Why is it successful?
1
|
|
|
|
|
1
|
Besides the Wikipedia article, I've always seen cold-reading as a sort of passive "guessing". In any population, there will be people who fit into a generalized "group", and information can be gleaned about the person from this group classification. How it works, people are horrible at statistics, and rarely realize how much about themselves they are constantly giving away just by doing everyday things. Then there's the wonderful flaw in human memory where we remember what confirms our previous biases, and will tend to forget that which discredits it. The JREF (http://www.randi.org/site/) is a place I like for information on psychics, and the such. James Randi makes the stuff fairly interesting, if you can find him speaking on it, but the others are fairly good as well. |
||
|
|
|
1
|
In my opinion, the best book you can get on cold reading is Ian Rowland's 'Full Facts Book Of Cold Reading (4th edition)'. In summary, the technique is used in practice by mediums and similar practitioners by following a few basic techniques like fishing for details, the Forer effect and vague statements and the like. The Skeptic's Dictionary has a great summary. Why is it successful? Due to subjective validation. People are compliant, as Robert T Carroll points out, and they are often seeking a reading because they believe already that the reading will be accurate. They'll 'remember the hits and forget the misses', they'll give information, show via body language what they are agreeing with or doubting. Selective memory will also play a part. |
||
|
|
|
1
|
Fundamentally, cold reading is the process of throwing out a number of open ended questions and statements presented as questions (i.e. "You know someone who ate mushrooms?") in the hopes that one of the questions is acknowledged by the mark. Additionally, the cold reader will watch for facial expressions and behavior to see if they might be getting near usable material. Unfortunately, humans tend to remember the "hits" far more than the "misses" and this results in people claiming the cold reader used special powers -- even thought they had something like a 80-90% miss rate. It's what is remembered by the mark that is important. A lot of back peddling and special pleading is usually accompanied with this technique as well. |
||
|
|
|
0
|
Here's a Wikipedia link that has a lot of info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading |
||||
|
