OddThinking

It was the end of an exciting day-long festival in Canberra, and I found myself sitting at the cafe table with a group of young men and women. While they were all friends, I only knew one person at the table – the rest I had only met that day.

A confident woman introduced herself to me, and then almost immediately started telling me about myself – e.g. aspects of my personality, what my interests were, etc. She wasn’t claiming any psychic powers; I think she was just trying to impress me with her intuitive ability to “pick people”.

I sat still and silent, apart from encouraging her occasionally to continue. I sat silent for two reasons. One was I didn’t want to give her ammunition for “shotgunning” – adapting what she said based on my reaction – but mainly because I could not believe the gall of this woman to try to cold-read me!

A brief analysis of her insights suggested obvious causes. I had been visible around the festival all day, taking many photos and appearing on stage, briefly, a couple of times. She had picked up some profiling from that.

However, she had underestimated my age by a rather flattering amount, and that had given her a bum steer. She concluded that I was still a student; based on my photography she predicted that I was creative and artistic, rather than the, more accurate, analysis of “camera geek”. She built up on this in entirely the wrong direction and soon was way off base.

My response was to demand a right of reply. I wanted the opportunity to cold-read her.

Off I went, starting slowly but building confidence. Some of my profile was based on her extroverted behaviour of gaining attention from the table with her profiling trick. Most of it, however, was based on me wracking my memory for as much as I could remember off the top of my head of Forer’s analysis and statements like it.

“You aren’t easily taken in by others; you like to see proof, but you are not an extreme cynic disbelieving everything you hear. You enjoy the company of friends and interesting new people, but you can be quite shy on occasion. Your journey through puberty was a difficult one, and brings back some sad memories, but you are generally proud of what you achieved. Still, you have has a few regrets about your behaviour that you still don’t like to reveal to others.”

She gave a ho-hum response, but that set off the crowd for the rest of the night. Everyone at the table was clamouring for me to read them next.

“But it’s all nonsense!” I protested, “I am just making it up.”

“I don’t care if it is cold-reading,” explained one guy who at least had heard of the term, “It is still interesting!”

So, I gave out a few more short readings now and again, basically at the rate I could remember/produce a handful more such meaningless lines.

“Some of your life goals are quite ambitious; occasionally you fear that they are unrealistic, but you still hold onto them in your heart. On the surface, you have had some recent unhappy dealings with your immediate family, but deep down you love them dearly, and would do anything to protect them.”

To a young woman I explained “Your approach to relationships has sometimes been like a rose bush; you make yourself appear to others like a pretty flower, but when men get too close they can find that there is a thorny side to your character.”

Realising I was running out of material, I started to make claims about the future – the number of children they would have, the jobs they would get, countries they would live in. That was easy – there was no way of proving me wrong.

I strayed briefly into hot reading. The only guy I knew there whispered some details of the family of one of the others. I started to spin my web:

“I get from your face that your family is a very big part of your life. I am getting the feeling that it is because it is not a small family – it is a big family – you have many siblings…”

“Yes!” he cried excitedly, “I have three brothers and four sisters.”

I smiled and bravely hid my disappointment. I already knew that – I thought I could string it out at least another couple of minutes before revealing that.

We ran out of time shortly afterwards – and as I walked back to my car I started to have mixed thoughts about the whole experience.

Part of me was stunned at how easy it had been. While I have read about cold-reading, I had never put it into practice. I am no John Edwards (spit to the left), but the amount of energy people had put into making my empty words into personal descriptions of their lives was astonishing.

The other part of me was a little unsure about my part in the experience. While I certainly hadn’t claimed to be a psychic (spit to the left), I hadn’t spent enough time explaining my technique and educating them about the dangers of believing this rubbish. I left behind one woman expressing disappointment that I hadn’t had a chance to do a reading of her; if I had been clearer about what I was doing, she should not have cared.

It comes back to the idea of honest liars. I would have felt more comfortable if I knew that everyone there really understood that cold reading can sound very impressive, but it is just a magic trick, using sleight-of-mind rather than sleight-of-hand.