Cold Reading 101

This is about you....

“You are a generally positive person who nevertheless lets things get on-top of you now and then. People say they relate to you really well and find you to be a good listener even though you sometimes feel that no-one understands you, your feelings or your motivation.

 “You have either a sporty or artistic streak which at times you feel could be better developed.

 “You are a good friend; supportive and caring however you would consider that you have a small number of ‘real friends’ who you know you can turn too. In many respects you have far more acquaintances than you have real friends… and your real friends you will keep close.

 “You had a very positive relationship with at least one of your parents (or guardians) although you sometimes felt that one of them just ‘couldn’t get you’ and your ideas, beliefs or attitudes.

“Although you may show a good deal of self confidence you feel insecure and uncertain of yourself.”

 “You can have a real stubborn streak too – especially when it comes to the things that you feel you are right about.”

So how accurate was that?

Now imagine that I had told you that those comments were based upon 'findings' from some process which used specific information about you..

Would you feel it was more accurate?

Well for most people the above statements would register as being more than 80% accurate AND experiments have shown that if those same statements were the result of some process (a personality test or horoscope perhaps) then that accuracy assessment would be increased.

Magicians and fraudulent psychics will recognise the statements above as BARNUM statements named after the American showman P.T. Barnum, and they are part of a series of devices that can be collectively called 'cold reading'.

In a Cold Reading the 'reader' will apparently say very specific things about you; you life and your situation. It is called 'cold reading' as the 'reader' is coming cold to the situation - they have no information about you. (In a "hot reading" they will have collected information about you and your situation).

Cold Reading is actually a very skilful art. It uses the subtleties of language; behavioural observations and Barnum statements to create the illusion that information about the 'sitter' (the person being read for).

So how do you learn to Cold Read?

Well you have to be a good people watcher. You can make so many assumptions about a person and their situation from some fairly simple observations... 

• What kind of clothes are they wearing?
  
• Are they wearing jewellry?
  
• How 'healthy' do they look?
  
• What age are they?
  

With these observations made you can link a few of them together to make some simple statements..

If they are wearing jewellry is there a wedding ring? 

The age you assess they are will give some interesting reference points about what names; music; opinions and attitudes they may have..

And so on...

Of course if you were to simply make a statement based upon your stereotypical assessments you'd possibly not going to get very far. But if you state your assumptions in the form of a question then you've opened up some interesting possibilities.

For example if you say...

"I see people around you.... you're not married are you?"

If they answer YES you can simply say "YES I thought so" and if NO then, "NO... I thought not, but you have been close ... "

You can't really be wrong because you've not made a claim.

So assumptions, Barnum statements and lingusitic trickery are all part of the approach we call Cold Reading. When such approaches are combined with a little bit of knowledge about body language then the cold reader can give what appear to be very accurate and precise readings.

If Cold Reading relied solely upon these artifices however then it would not be so convincing. What makes such readings so 'accurate' relies upon the psychology of the sitter.

First of all belief systems come into play here. If a sitter believes that the reader is using a system that has value, tradition or cudos then they are more likely to be predisposed to find meaning within the comments that are being made. At a very basic level our minds want to make sense of the information presented to it... it seeks to understand by looking for things it can recognise.

Secondly our memory is fallable... a sitter will not remember exactly what was said by whom and at what point in the conversation. So in re-telling the event they will selectively select or remember the 'hits' (as cold readers call the statements that resonate) and forget the misses. This becomes even more apparent when there is a strong belief in the readers ability or the tools they use to make the statements they do - this is known as confirmation bias. We will remember the things that confirm our beliefs and discunt or forget those that don't.

So are all 'readers' fake are they all applying these principles?

A long time ago when I first started performing as a mentalist (that is the fancy term used to describe entertainers who base the themes of their presentations on the mind and mental abilities) I came across the following distinction.

There are 'open eye' readers - these are those who know they are using psychological tools, linguistic decpetion and highly tunded observational skills to do what they do AND there are 'shut eyes'.

The 'shut eye reader' was said to be using these skills unconsciously. I can see how a personal belief system can be strong enough to help convince those who are unconsciously competent in these skills to think they are not 'doing anything ssneaky'. In fact these skills are at one level part and parcel of our natural communication abilities.

I think perhaps a more interesting question  has to be the 'intent' of the 'reader'... but that's another issue.

OH, by the way Happy New Year..

Alan