Psychic cold reading is a way used by different people from mediums to showmen to gather information and details about their client or audience. They use this to convince their audience that they know more about a subject because they have extra sensory perception or they have the paranormal talent to decipher a person’s aura.
Psychic cold reading is using the details divulged by the audience and making them believe it is the psychic who have deciphered it. A medium can do a psychic cold reading by observing his or her audience and their body language, reactions, and mannerisms. They would shout out high probability guesses and once they see a reaction from a captive audience, they hone in on it.
There are various types of techniques associated with psychic cold reading. A type of technique is delivery of a prepared script. Using the latest surveys and polls and checking for the stereotypes in an audience can be the subject of a written spiel. They would pretend that they get these information by psychic means, but in reality they got it from surveys and polls.
Another technique is the shotgun approach where questions are asked rapidly and hopefully one of the projectiles would illicit a reaction from the audience. The medium just needs to observe carefully the body language or the reactions from the audience and then would acknowledge the people who reacted to the projectiles he just hurled. He would then specify his questions to suit the audience. The use of vagueness and ambiguity or making the audience fill in the details and connecting them with their own lives is called the Forer effect. This technique, on the other hand relies on so called Barnum Statements, they are statements that seem personal yet it applies to many.
Psychic cold reading has been practiced before, an example is Sherlock Holmes, through his power of deductive reasoning. Mediums and seers would convince you that it’s a phenomenon but in truth it’s all in the details.
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