How good of a detective are you? Try Cold Readings

Added: 12/19/2006

Have you ever been asked a question by someone only to find out later that they knew half of the answer already? When you go into a department store to buy something are you shocked when the salesman seems to know exactly what you came in looking for and how much you had to spend? Even without having ever seeing you before, a good cold reader can still make an educated guess at lots of different pieces of information, and be correct, about you by analyzing several factors. Did you know that each of us does this every day?

Knowing the nature of someone's culture, race, paying attention to the way a person combs or styles their hair or the clothes they wear or the way they speak all can give us clues that enable us to do cold readings about a person. In terms of salespeople, cold readings are used to convince someone that you know much more about them than you actually do. Without even knowing it, we are all making assumptions about people everyday. When you are sitting in a restaurant and someone walks in, there are instantly a number of assumptions made about the type of person he is, the amount of money that person makes, the type of car he drives, the type of home he lives in, how many kids he has and what he does for a living, all in a matter of seconds!

Salesmen and fortune tellers alike use different techniques to get the same results. There are a couple of different cold reading techniques that are used in the fortune teller arena. One of these techniques is called "shotgunning."

As the name suggests, cold readings done by shotgunning begin by just throwing a bunch of generic information out to a large number of people, maybe in an audience and, watching for the response to the information by the audience, usually picking up on body language as the largest sign, a fortune teller will begin to narrow the statements as he goes. Knowing that there are certain things that apply to a large number of the population, a cold reading takes advantage of examining an audience and making guesses about something they might all have in common. For example, if the audience is all in the 30 something crowd, the assumption that might be made is that many have small children. So, an example might be:

"I see a child like figure crying, a baby, a toddler, maybe a child you babysit, ...I sense that he/she has lost something, maybe a favorite toy..."

Then, as he watches the reactions to this general information, he may key in on one particular person who has an overwhelming response to his "reading" and, continuing to watch their reaction to more of what he says, he may actually convince the person that he knows more about her than he actually does. Doing this little by little, the cold reading may actually reveal something true about someone and the reading is said to be a success.

Another example of the cold readings techniques is the Forer Effect, or Barnum Statements. In using this technique, the reader uses statements that SEEM personal but still could apply to a large number of people. The difference between this technique and the one above is that the Barnum statements are very open-ended...letting the reading have a large margin for error and encouraging the participant to be more active than just a listener and make statements that help the reader continue along a certain path.

Although not designed to be deceptive or harmful, sometimes these readings can evoke feelings that have long since been dealt with. Be very careful when taking part in this type of entertainment. It may cause you such pain, your old therapists' telephone number is back on your speed dial!

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