How do psychics deal with people from other cultures?

[KingofMadCows]

One thing I noticed about psychics is that they only deal with people from their own culture. John Edward's audience is filled with Americans so it's easy for him to shoot off a bunch of ordinary American names and get a hit. Americans have a lot in common in the way they live, what they worry about, what they do for a living, even how they die.

Wouldn't it be easy to debunk psychics if you just have them do readings for an audience full of people from Hong Kong? It doesn't even have to be people that are so culturally different, it could be people from Australia, or even obscure parts of America like Amish communities, or maybe a mix of different people from cultures that the psychic is not familiar with.

[shandyjan]

I think you answered your own question...it would be even easier to debunk when they got no hits!
If it was all real of course they would manage with any language or culture!

BTW welcome to the forum!

[borealys]

It's also worth noting that different cultures have different kinds of myths and superstitions. Ghosts and guardian angels are concepts ingrained in western culture. People coming from elsewhere in the world may find the idea of communicating with the spirits of dead loved ones every bit as odd as a typical John Edward fan would find the idea of communicating with genies.

[RSL's better half]

Somewhere I saw footage of Sylvia Browne, from early in her "career," on some TV show and "reading" folks in the audience. I seem to recall a couple who were like tourists or something, and I think they were from Germany. As I recall, nothing she said to them was a hit. Eh! Maybe none of her "readings" was a hit, I can't remember. In my mind I'm linking Randi to this footage, like he may have shown it. Anyway, I think you may have something there.

[shandyjan]

I remember seeing something too Susan, maybe it was in a sylvia thread on this site..or a link on your husbands.

[KingofMadCows]

I'm just wondering why people haven't tried this before. Psychics are always saying that what they're doing is not a trick. They say that they're not doing cold readings even though they get the same results as cold readers. That's not a completely unreasonable claim since it's not inconceivable that information can be derived from different sources. So the most obvious way to prove the they're not doing cold readings is to put them in a situation where cold reading would not work at all. Hence, you give the psychic an audience from a background that they know very little about so that cold reading techniques would be ineffective.

[athon]

This would be easy to explain.

If I feigned psychic powers, I'd state that those from 'beyond' didn't speak to me in their own voice, but pulled emotions, words, memories etc. from my own soul to communicate. Hence if I didn't share their culture, I'd have a hard time communicating what they were wanting me to say.

In other words, there'd always be some BS they could make up. That's the thing with fantasy - you can always make up whatever you want. Sure, it might conflict with other bits of make-believe they've come up with earlier, but few people care for internal consistency when evaluating what they hear.

Athon

[KingofMadCows]

Then get some people who spent most of their lives abroad but whose (dead) parents belonged to the same culture as the psychic.

[fuelair]

Shamefully, dishonestly, unethically, cruelly,absurdly, foolishly, inexcusably, fraudulently-just like they deal with those from their own culture.

[quarky]

Spiritualists are only chosen to work with a certain group of people, just as shamans can only have healing concern for the members of their own tribe. Its too much to ask of a psychic to have them intuit names they can't even pronounce. For those people, there are other psychics. Its a tidy system.

[Uncayimmy]

Must be easy to be a psychic in China...

http://www.logoi.com/notes/common_chinese_names.html
Here is a list of the most common lastnames:
Chen (Chan)
Lin
Huang (Hwang, Hwong)
Li (Lee)
Zhang (Chang)
Wu (U, O, Oh)
Wang (Wong)
Cai (Tsai)
Liu
Over 50% of all Chinese people have one of these nine Chinese family names. And just 50 different family names are sufficient to name 90% of the population of China, that is, over a billion people. That is a significant portion of the world!

[rjh01]

Somewhere I saw footage of Sylvia Browne, from early in her "career," on some TV show and "reading" folks in the audience. I seem to recall a couple who were like tourists or something, and I think they were from Germany. As I recall, nothing she said to them was a hit. Eh! Maybe none of her "readings" was a hit, I can't remember. In my mind I'm linking Randi to this footage, like he may have shown it. Anyway, I think you may have something there.

Try this one http://www.stopsylvia.com/articles/exploringpsychicpowerslive.shtml

[EeneyMinnieMoe]

The exact same thing occurred to me about mediums. Why can't they access any information about other cultures and languages? That they wouldn't otherwise know?

Why can't they read someone with a name written in Arabic or Sanskrit or Cyrillic?

Why doesn't John Edward ever go "I'm getting the letter 'Sha'...was his nickname Pasha?"

I started a thread about it once: http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=76344

[blutoski]

The exact same thing occurred to me about mediums. Why can't they access any information about other cultures and languages? That they wouldn't otherwise know?

Why can't they read someone with a name written in Arabic or Sanskrit or Cyrillic?

Why doesn't John Edward ever go "I'm getting the letter 'Sha'...was his nickname Pasha?"


The frustrating thing about it is that their explanations are perfectly acceptable to the believers.

Specifically, "I don't know. It doesn't seem to work that way. It works, but differently than you expect. If you really want to know, become a medium and investigate. Me: I'm going to concentrate on helping people."

[blue sock monkey]

Back in the heyday of Spiritualism, the "top names" in the business such as Daniel Home and Eusapia Pallaino performed in America, England, and Europe including Russia. But oddly enough ;) we don't hear of them visiting Asia.

[bickerer]

Didn't Sylvia ocassionally pull made-up foreign names out of her nether regions? There was a case of a little girl kidnapped from her Grandparents yard in Texas (iirc) who she claimed had been taken to Japan to work in the famous Japanese white slave camps and she gave a goobledygook somewhat Japanese sounding name for the town, which of course, doesn't exist. Had there been Japanese people in the audience, they probably would have called her on it. Sort of the reversal of what's being asked here. Perhaps Francine is uni-lingual.