Common cold reading lines

[Adamspoon]

Hello everyone, I've been reading the forum off and on for a while but this is my first post, which is more of a question really.

My friend's sister recently visited a psychic who amazingly was able to tell her things about her family that he could not possibly have known unless his powers were genuine (well imagine that!):jaw-dropp

I had a rather drunken argument with said friend where i tried to explain about the cold reading etc techniques employed by such psychics. Unfortunately due to the amount of alcohol i had consumed i was not able to argue my point particularly well and did not do a good job of convincing him.

There was one specific piece of information that the psychic told her which really amazed them both (i won't tell you what it is yet as i'd be interested to see if anyone else mentions it). Presumably this was one of several predictions/guesses made and he happened to score a lucky hit.

I am currently reading Richard Wiseman's Quirkology. In one section he mentions that there are certain facts which seem really specific but which statistically actually apply to a surprising number of people (i think he uses the example that one in three people have a scar on their left knee). Psychics will obviously use this sort of tactic because they have a high probability of a hit whilst still amazing the client.

Anyway, the point of my rambling post is to ask: Does anyone know if there is a list of common cold reading lines used by psychics?

I'd love to be able to show him that this amazing psychic is just re-hashing tries and tested techniques.

[EeneyMinnieMoe]

Oh, there are so many. Cold reading isn't just a simple trick- it's an entire series of techniques.

Among other things, cold reading could involve being able to read body language and study and react to facial expressions, psychological profiling, racial/ ethnic/ gender/ age profiling, being aware of and using psychological phenomena to your advantage, just plain guesswork and language semantics.

For instance, the one time I let a palm reader take advantage of me, she correctly guessed that my friend and I were both single and looking for boyfriends. I'm guessing she deduced this based on my appearance, dress, weight and age (we were 15 at the time). Maybe even our behavior; she could have gotten the impression that we were shy and not confident around boys. Which may be why she told me I'd never get married.

Edit: One common thing that psychics do is throw out a reasonable guess and follow up on it if they get a positive reaction. This psychic, for instance, told me "I see that you're doing allright in school but not as well as you should" and seeing my stunned and embarrassed reaction, instantly seized on it and told me a few more things pertaining to that.

As you mention, they supply information that's common to many people but sounds specific to you. If you confirm or seem to affirm what they say or help them by telling them more information, they slowly narrow it down. And you don't remember it as an exchange; you remember it as the psychic telling you all of this right off the bat, instead of you telling them.

"He told me my grandfather died of a heart attack!", you may think, instead of remembering that say, he first told you that he saw an older man and you volunteered that it must be your late grandfather after which he said that "there's something in the chest area" and you volunteered that your grandfather died of a heart attack.

[RSLancastr]

Ian Rowland's book on cold reading gives a list of things which are true of more of us than we'd think at first. The only one which comes to mind right now is "You have a box of photographs at home which you haven't put into albums yet."

A good cold reader has several lists of these statements in their head, and knows which list to use based on the client/mark's gender, age, social status, financial condition, and more.

[Big Les]

One category of universally applicable cold reading statements are the Barnum Statements (see below). Vague techniques rely more than ever upon subjective validation - the client finding a personal significance in impersonal statements (and then often remembering a much more specific 'hit'.

The key with good cold reading is that the vague stuff alone won't cut it - you have know how to pump the client for info, use guesses and clever wordplay etc, in order to narrow down statements to quite specific results. A major goal is to essentially ask questions whilst appearing not to.

That aside, these are Barnum Statements;
"You have a strong need for people to like and respect you."
"You tend to feel you have a lot of unused capacity, and that people don't always give you full credit for your abilities."
"Some of your hopes and goals tend to be pretty unrealistic."
"You are an independent and original thinker; you don't just accept what people tell you to believe."

There are all sorts of common things like the box of photos thing (like a key with no purpose), and lesser known or readily appreciated things, like the chance of there being a blue car outside your house at some time, or things like hair length - most women have had it long at some time, most men have dabbled with facial hair, and so on. Statistically you have a good chance of hitting on a minor criminal act in someone's past e.g. shoplifting as a teenager. If you get a miss, you convert this by scaling it to a stolen pencil. If they still deny, then it's something they took without meaning to, or something they've forgotten about, or whatever other plausible rationalisation you can cook up in order to segue into something else more fruitful.

Rowland's book is the business. I recommend it unreservedly (though it ain't cheap).

[thaiboxerken]

Horoscopes are a good source of cold reading scripts.

[steve s]

Horoscopes are a good source of cold reading scripts.

Yep. Some of the ones I see frequently...

"You are your own worst critic."
"You have an unusual voice." (doesn't everyone think that their voice sounds strange when they hear it on a recording?)


The only one which comes to mind right now is "You have a box of photographs at home which you haven't put into albums yet."

Another one is "You have some clothes in your closet that still have the tags on."

Steve S.

[Brattus]

You sometimes fantasize about being famous.
There is someone you wish you could speak with, one last time.
There are some who refuse to understand how complex you truly are.
Someone is lying to you.
You sometimes wish you had a better/different job.

[thaiboxerken]

Criss angel used horoscopes, the same ones, for five people were all convinced of his psychic powers afterwards. He disclosed the ruse to then afterwards.

[fromdownunder]

Look at the ring finger. If there is a mark where a wedding band used to be, "Are you recently divorced? Or if they inadvertantly say they got a divorce at one time, and they are wearing a band "But you re-married, right?" This can be easily glossed over though if the reader is incorrect.

Norm

[JoeTheJuggler]

This doesn't really answer your question, but I can almost guarantee you that the thing that amazed you and your friend wasn't something the psychic told him. She problem said something that could be taken a million different ways, and he filled in the info. When he related it to you, he told you that she said that. That's the main principle of cold reading.

The stuff most people are giving you is the Barnum effect (or the Forer effect), when the psychic just says something that applies to everyone, but most people think describes them uniquely. (I doubt if this is the kind of thing that wowed the two of you, because it only takes a moment's reflection to realize that it would apply to anyone.)

In a cold reading, I could see the psychic starting off with these kinds of things just to get the client talking. Most of the sentences out of the psychic's mouth are phrased as questions.

Just an example:
psychic: I sense change; are you experiencing a change in your life?
client: Why yes, I've just started a new job.
psychic: Yes, I see you've started a new job (insert some of those Forer effect statments here about being nervous and excited at the same time).

The next day, the client will tell his friend that the psychic knew he had just started a new job. "How could she have known that? There's no way it was cold reading."

[Adamspoon]

This doesn't really answer your question, but I can almost guarantee you that the thing that amazed you and your friend wasn't something the psychic told him. She problem said something that could be taken a million different ways, and he filled in the info. When he related it to you, he told you that she said that. That's the main principle of cold reading.

The stuff most people are giving you is the Barnum effect (or the Forer effect), when the psychic just says something that applies to everyone, but most people think describes them uniquely. (I doubt if this is the kind of thing that wowed the two of you, because it only takes a moment's reflection to realize that it would apply to anyone.)

In a cold reading, I could see the psychic starting off with these kinds of things just to get the client talking. Most of the sentences out of the psychic's mouth are phrased as questions.

Just an example:
psychic: I sense change; are you experiencing a change in your life?
client: Why yes, I've just started a new job.
psychic: Yes, I see you've started a new job (insert some of those Forer effect statments here about being nervous and excited at the same time).

The next day, the client will tell his friend that the psychic knew he had just started a new job. "How could she have known that? There's no way it was cold reading."

Thanks for the comments everyone. Just to clarify JoeTheJuggler, I wasn't amazed by the psychic's readings , just my friend and his sister. I am reasonably familiar with cold reading techniques so I can imagine the sort of conversation which might have lead to my friend's sister believing that this Psychic had amazing powers. I just wondered if the line he gave her was a well known ploy used by these charlatans.

I may as well tell you what the amazing discovery was: Basically the Psychic apparently told my friend's sister that her mother had not been the youngest of her siblings and that there had been a stillborn child before her. Apparently my friend's sister knew nothing about this but when she asked her mum she found out that it was true. (This is her version of events, i'm sure the real conversation was somewhat different, but this is what she remembers now!)

Now I can see how this may seem amazing to someone without a sceptical viewpoint but as we know this must have been a lucky hit. My friend's sister is in her mid/late 20s so I guess the psychic must have gauged the age of her mum and guessed that she was born around the 1940s/50s. I suppose in the 40s/50s stillbirths were a lot more common so it's one of those surprisingly high probability guesses. If he'd been wrong i'm sure she would have just forgotten all about it.

[JoeTheJuggler]

Thanks for the comments everyone. Just to clarify JoeTheJuggler, I wasn't amazed by the psychic's readings , just my friend and his sister.
Sorry. My bad.

I may as well tell you what the amazing discovery was: Basically the Psychic apparently told my friend's sister that her mother had not been the youngest of her siblings and that there had been a stillborn child before her. Apparently my friend's sister knew nothing about this but when she asked her mum she found out that it was true. (This is her version of events, i'm sure the real conversation was somewhat different, but this is what she remembers now!)

Now I can see how this may seem amazing to someone without a sceptical viewpoint but as we know this must have been a lucky hit.

I assume you're focusing on the stillborn child (the other part--that the mother wasn't the youngest could've been gotten by any number of hints from the client, and it would be something the client surely knew--maybe a reference to an aunt or uncle or cousin that gave some hint at ages--then it's a 50/50 chance as to whether those relatives are siblings of the client's mother or father).

I'm not so sure the stillborn child had to be a very lucky hit.

I can think of three other scenarios:

1) Guessing a stillborn child might not be such long odds. The psychic knows the age of the client, and can estimate the mother's age. In my grandparents' generation, large families and stillbirths were a lot more common than now. (Maybe an actuary could tell us what the probability is of a random family in a certain age range to have had a stillborn child?)

2) Your friend is misremembering the exact story (an explanation you hinted at). Maybe she went home from the reading with the admonition to ask her mother about a family tragedy that happened before the mother's birth. (It would be impossible NOT to score a hit with that!) After getting the "hit" and information about the stillbirth, her memory is now fixed that those were the psychic's words. Memory is that plastic.

3) Your friend is mistaken about knowing about the stillbirth ahead of time. (Not a very satisfactory explanation--and I don't find your friend maybe subconsciously feeding the information to the psychic very plausible either.)

There's also the whole forget the misses and remember the hits phenomenon. I wonder if there any other things she was told to check out that turned out to be misses? One of the "outs" for a cold reader is to say that the statement is true but the client just doesn't know it yet.

Back to the OP: another common cold reading regarding a cause of death is to say it had to do with the "head or chest". That safely covers nearly ALL causes of death, and a believing client will tell people that the psychic knew the death was a heart attack.

[AgeGap]

http://www.skepticreport.com/lighterside/psychicdice.htm
Have fun!

I can see you have a warm aura.

[Adamspoon]

I can see you have a warm aura.

Wow! AgeGap:jaw-dropp It's like you've known me my whole life!


And JoeTheJuggler, i'm sure it's a combination of 1 & 2.

[VulcanWay]

There was a segment on an episode of Penn & Teller's show that had several psychics read the same guy at different times and allowing each psychic to see a different setup prior to the reading.

I don't remember each of them (I think there were four), but a couple were:

They had the guy unshaved and wearing unkempt clothes. The psychic then told him all about how he needed motivation in his life and whatnot.
Then they had him shave and dress up in a suit. They then let the psychic overhear him on a phone call telling his wife about how he wouldn't be home anytime soon - the busy businessman schtick. The psychic then told him how he had to slow down and smell the roses and that there were other important things in the world besides business.
You get the point.

[RichardR]

This Bingo Card (http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2007/11/john-edward-jam.html) has most of the common ones, with explanations.

[schlitt]

It is very likely the client provided the information unwittingly, and it was then fed back to them at an opportune time.
There are many techniques, most of the best ones rely on the quirks of human nature wanting to participate.
.

[Niobe]

Ian Rowland's book on cold reading gives a list of things which are true of more of us than we'd think at first.
A good cold reader has several lists of these statements in their head, and knows which list to use based on the client/mark's gender, age, social status, financial condition, and more.

Exactly. It's like the woman saying you were going to die of a heart attack.
For me, I'm a 20-something married woman with one 3 year old child. A pretty decent cold reader would say "I see another child in your future!"
, when we never told anybody we were trying, ohmygosh!

Let's ignore the fact that at the last social gathering every person in the room asked about a hypothetical second child.

[Ron_Tomkins]

Hmm, I can sense someone in your family once went through a hard time.

Someone close. Maybe not so close... wait... oh I'm getting dizzy.

I lost it. Oh well. Come back tomorrow.

[AgeGap]

Here (http://homepage.bluewin.ch/Ysewijn/english_Barnum.htm) is quite a neat page on the Barnum effect.

ETA: Look at the Forer effect for more info.

Cold reading is jumping to conclusions, letting your imagination run wild and then passing it through a filter to take out anything specific.
Also put a positive spin on it. People want it confirmed that they are basically decent. Nobody wants to be told they are a ****.
Derren Brown's Tricks of the Mind (Shill) £5 from Zavvi has a section about cold reading. It has an analysis for people in their mid twenties-All cold reading.

I had a friend whose GF(now ex) went to a psychic. Because the GF looked like a chav the psychic told her she was in an abusive relationship. (Jumping to conclusions.) This went on to cause a lot of grief and they split up. Still, as people say, it is not doing any harm.

[Big Les]

That aspect is sometimes overlooked I think - the self-fulfilling prophecy angle. Can't get the mark's past right? Why not shape their future instead!

[JoeTheJuggler]

Also put a positive spin on it. People want it confirmed that they are basically decent. Nobody wants to be told they are a ****.

Flattery and anything that makes a person feel "special" (sort of the way almost anyone who sees a chiropractor is told that they have one leg shorter than the other).

Since most people who spend money on a psychic believe in psychic abilities, you'd be pretty safe saying something like, "Ohh! You're an exceptionally spiritual person," or "You have a very old soul," or "You have some amazing psychic abilities yourself. I'll bet you can sense things about people and not know how you know."

Similarly, for the past-life people, you can't do wrong to claim they were a famous person or a shaman or a healer or whatever in a past life.

ETA: You probably wouldn't tell them they were a pedophile or rapist or petty thief in a past life.

[Polaris]

Criss angel used horoscopes, the same ones, for five people were all convinced of his psychic powers afterwards. He disclosed the ruse to then afterwards.

Randi did the same thing with a classroom full of students. The video's on youtube.

[EeneyMinnieMoe]

Flattery and anything that makes a person feel "special" (sort of the way almost anyone who sees a chiropractor is told that they have one leg shorter than the other).


Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't everybody have one leg slightly shorter than the other? :confused: The same way the right side of your face is always going to be different than the left, no matter how symmetrical you may look at first glance?

I honestly don't see why anyone would feel special to be told that, except if they felt enormously desperate to feel unique (which this wouldn't make you- it would make you just like the rest of the world). Having two legs of varying length sounds like it might be a problem. :p

Returning to the OP, there are a variety of cold-reading tricks used when performing in front of a large or small crowd and not at an individual reading.

For instance, John Edward's initial schtick is something that only works very well with a large group of people. And Sylvia Browne has suddenly called out to the crowd "Who's Kevin?" or "I'm getting a Jennifer!". Or has suddenly picked someone out of the crowd and claimed that their dead relative or friend wants to communicate and proceed to cold-read them. When it works, it's very dramatic and pays off big time.

[Ersby]

Other techniques involve clever phrasing of the questions to increase the probability of a hit without being too obvious. For example, a John Edward would ask "who's pregnant?", instead of being specific, or he'd say "Are you the only son/daughter?" which is a great hit if the subject is an only child, still impressive if they're the only sibling of that gender, and even if that's a miss, he'd follow up with "why are they putting you to one side?"

Knowing who said what to who is essential, since memories tend to be pretty unreliable. I was once told by a believer about a reading where JE told a member of the audience that there had been three suicides in her family. When I finally got the transcript (in all fairness, from the same person) I saw that JE had guessed one suicide to an area of the audience. Then one person said that fitted her, JE guessed a second. That was a miss so he asked this area of the audience again. A second person said it could be them, at which point he guessed a third suicide and got a hit. Since suicides "clustering" around families is not unheard of, it's not such a great hit, and certainly a lot less impressive than the original claim.

[MoonDragn]

Yeah I must be a really good cold reader. I have done it on the internet where I can't see the person. Don't even know what sex they are.

It was amazing that I got that she was pregnant, had problems with her previous childbirths, and even told her what color panties she was wearing ;)

[Big Les]

Yeah I must be a really good cold reader. I have done it on the internet where I can't see the person.

What on earth makes you think that you need to be able to see the person? Sceptics here have done cold readings in chat channels (guys - anyone have a chat log?)

Don't even know what sex they are.

So what?

It was amazing that I got that she was pregnant, had problems with her previous childbirths, and even told her what color panties she was wearing ;)

If you told her that right off the bat, that is pretty impressive. Less so if you got there via cold reading methods (whether you realised it or not). Care to post the correspondence?

[MoonDragn]

If you told her that right off the bat, that is pretty impressive. Less so if you got there via cold reading methods (whether you realised it or not). Care to post the correspondence?

No, cause it happened a while back and I usually don't keep logs of anything. Its not like I went out to prove anything. Like I said, how can you prove anything? Logs can be faked, I could be lying, I could be delusional, I could have been lucky. I personally believe proving any kind of psychic ability is like proving religion. You either take it on blind faith or you just don't believe in it. Who cares?

[Tumblehome]

And Sylvia Browne has suddenly called out to the crowd "Who's Kevin?" or "I'm getting a Jennifer!".


Has a psychic ever asked for an uncommon name, like, "Who's Vladimir?", or, "There's a Madison in the audience, isn't there."? Funny how they only connect with people who have common names. ;)

[AgeGap]

Has a psychic ever asked for an uncommon name, like, "Who's Vladimir?", or, "There's a Madison in the audience, isn't there."? Funny how they only connect with people who have common names. ;)

I can see you are saying that because you are quite sceptical and think hard about certain things. This may come as a surprise to those around you. Uniquely though, for a deep thinker, you are not closed to new ideas.

[Prometheus]

Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't everybody have one leg slightly shorter than the other? :confused: The same way the right side of your face is always going to be different than the left, no matter how symmetrical you may look at first glance?

I honestly don't see why anyone would feel special to be told that, except if they felt enormously desperate to feel unique (which this wouldn't make you- it would make you just like the rest of the world). Having two legs of varying length sounds like it might be a problem....


Wow! How did you know? ;)

Also: http://skepdic.com/skeptimedia/skeptimedia1.html

[Tumblehome]

I can see you are saying that because you are quite sceptical and think hard about certain things. This may come as a surprise to those around you. Uniquely though, for a deep thinker, you are not closed to new ideas.


Something that strokes my ego like that and appeals to my sense of self-importance can only be absolutely true. You're amazing!

How much do I owe you? ;)

[Ichneumonwasp]

I have a lot of trouble reading lines when I have a common cold. It's a concentration thing I think.......

Oh, sorry.

[Big Les]

No, cause it happened a while back and I usually don't keep logs of anything. Its not like I went out to prove anything. Like I said, how can you prove anything? Logs can be faked, I could be lying, I could be delusional, I could have been lucky. I personally believe proving any kind of psychic ability is like proving religion. You either take it on blind faith or you just don't believe in it. Who cares?

Then why bring it up? Do you realise where you are?