I could be your magician Photo (cc) jin.thai
There’s all sorts of reasons why pseudosciences flourish. One which is overlooked is that it’s not stupid people who get taken in. In fact if you’re planning a successful career in deception there are plenty of good reasons not to target stupid people. A fool and his money are easily parted, so they’re not likely to be rich. They’ll explain your story to others in simple terms, exposing you pretty quickly. Finally stupid people need things explained to them carefully. It’s a lot of hard and unnecessary work. I’ve an amateur interest in magic, especially mentalism. Cold reading isn’t a magic technique, but it’s a useful skill to have to add finesse to tricks. The one of the ways it works may also explain one of the reasons people find pseudosciences so compelling.
Put simply Cold Reading is a way of providing some words and leaving the mark to make sense of it. In much the same way a hole-in-one is simply hitting a golf ball so that it lands in the hole at the first attempt. I’ll try and give some examples but like a lot of tricks they look mundane once written down.
Here’s my first prediction.
How could I possibly know that? Have I looked into your soul? Not as far as I know. It’s a common experience that everyone has had. For a start you had an accident or illness when you were younger. Well, it’s hardly likely to be a prediction about your past if I say when you are older is it? But what about the actual claim. You were ill or injured. Again what are the chances of that happening some time in your past? Your parents were worried about it? Of course they were. That’s what parents do. It’s more likely you were an orphan than your parents didn’t worrying about something. And as for the final element, it wasn’t as serious as they feared – you don’t say this to someone in a wheelchair, but if you survived it then it wasn’t as serious as they thought. If you didn’t survive it then I send my condolences.
Put down like that it’s not impressive. It’s a simple Barnum statement. The trick is how you package it. If you feel like freaking out other people then you can try it down the pub.
Pick up your drink and then stop suddenly like someone’s walked over your grave. Look in the eyes of the person opposite – who’ll be looking at you because of the sudden jerk. “Wow!” or your own word of choice should escape your lips. The other person will probably ask what the problem is. “They were really worried weren’t they?” This makes no sense to the other person, so you’ll need to elaborate. “Sorry I just had this feeling that your parents were really worried about you when you were younger. I dunno what, you were sick or something. I don’t think it turned out to be as serious as they thought. Wow, that was really weird.”
The important part happens if the suggestion takes hold. You’ve said nothing of note, apart from planting the suggestion “think of a time you were ill/injured”. Thinking about what you’ve said they’ll match it to their own childhood memories. If the mark makes a connection then it becomes a suggestion from their own mind. This is going to be far more convincing than any connection you make. This is why intelligence and creativity is important. One connection isn’t that impressive you need to create repeated hits. If you’re asking people to make connections then it helps if they can do it quickly and easily. This is why intelligent or creative people are better marks. Stupid people are too slow for this technique to work effectively.
There’s a lot more to cold reading than this, and I suggest you get a copy of Ian Rowland’s The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading for more information on that. The reason I think it’s relevant to pseudosciences is that pseudosciences intentionally or not, also work with suggestions rather than evidence. It asks you to engage your imagination with possibilities rather than your critical skills. You make the connections and credit the pseudoscientist with the fruits of your own imagination.
This is why psychic shows don’t always cut the misses. A good show will have the interviews at the end. In these segments people have had much longer to think about the significance of what was said. They’ve given their imaginations longer to work. Any connections they make will be more obscure and the medium will be credited with knowing what even the mark didn’t know. The all the effort the mark put in and all the imagination used to make the connection will credited to the psychic. In the case of a good pseudoscience it won’t explain how it works. There may be vibrations or mystic energy, but nothing that actually means anything. The meaning is what you put there. The more effort you expend thinking about it the more likely you are to being committed to the cause.
Now here’s the good bit. Assume you are sold. You are an imaginative, creative and a sincere believer so you’ll be an excellent salesperson for my scam. Imagine the response if someone nice but a bit thick was asked to explain what ‘negative vibrations’ actually were. You on the other hand would be able to come up with some possible explanation in your own words. Furthermore your friend would know you’re not gullible or stupid and that makes you a credible informant.
I don’t need to convince everyone using this technique to make a living from it. I just need to convince enough. You don’t have to accept my pseudoscience, but maybe one of your friends will. You’re not a mental clone of your friends nor they of you. If it whatever I propose runs against one of your deep beliefs then it’s more likely to be rejected. But if I say something that you secretly believed all along then it’s very attractive.
That’s why I don’t think the average believer in pseudoscience or pseudohistory is necessarily a fool. A fool isn’t going to understand enough about ancient Egypt or medieval Britain to make a coherent argument. An intelligent person will be creative enough to find a dozen reasons how a civilisation from 10,500 BC can exist, survive eight thousand years and return to take over ancient Egypt all without leaving an archaeological trace. They won’t have any evidence, but they’ll also be able to tell you why that doesn’t matter.
And that’s precisely why evidence does matter. It’s not simply a case of disproving what other people think. It’s also important that your own imagination doesn’t fool you. Returning to the evidence isn’t infallible, it can always be interpreted in different ways, but it’s the best method we have of not simply believing what we want to believe.
There’s more on Barnum statements at Language Log and more on Cold Reading at the Skeptic Dictionary.
End note
A couple of times I mentioned that it’s important that a pseudoscience believer is intelligent. Did you find that convincing? You’ll notice I didn’t provide any evidence. I just asked you to use your imagination and make the connections yourself. You might want to think about this some more – but if you do that could you be spending more of your mental effort persuading yourself of the truth of what I’ve said?
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