Looking for "How Do They Do It" sites

[John Foster]

Hi all; I am a new poster here. Last week at my son's high school they were entertained by a psychic/hypnotist. The children came home convinced of this guy's authenticity. I am wondering if there are any good online resources that will expose the "tricks of the trade" of these characters. Thank you John.

[thaiboxerken]

You are at a good site already. Do a search in the forum for "cold reading". Also, skepdic.com has a good definition of cold reading that explains what it is.

[JLam]

www.themagiccafe.com is a site where magicians/mentalists discuss their techniques. You can learn a lot there. But feel free to ask questions here. Most of us are very well versed in the tricks of the psychic trade.

[Nucular]

Welcome, John. It'd be interesting to know what types of things your man did that impressed the children so - maybe we could comment specifically on what techniques might have been used.

As a general comment on psychics, cold reading is indeed a method commonly used, and you'll find a wealth of stuff searching this and other sites.

As well as relying on things like sharp observation of a person to work stuff out about them, this technique also centres on an effect variously called the Barnum Effect, or Forer Effect (google away), which is the effect which describes how very general statements are taken by an individual to uniquely apply only to them - like, "you're quite a generous person", etc.

There's also the possibility of 'hot reading', which is actually surreptitiously finding stuff out about someone beforehand - probably quite easy if you're performing at a school, where there's photos of people everywhere, and teachers and records, etc.

Another thing often relied upon by psychics is the 'confirmation bias' phenomenon, which is basically what happens when we remember the 'hits' and forget the 'misses' - psychic misses are so extraordinarily boring that we tend to forget they even happened, but the ones we tell again and again, often bigging up in the process, are the seemingly improbable accurate statements.

Psychics often also have 'outs' which allow them to wriggle out of misses - if something is framed as a question, e.g. "did you have a cat which died recently?", then if the answer is negative it can either be 1) moved away from quickly, 2) delved around e.g. "what about a dog?", or 3) justified, like "no I didn't think so, because this cat being referred to died a long time ago".

There are simple 'mindreading' style magic tricks which can be extremely impressive, especially with a gloss of "this is real" - these fall under the category heading 'mentalism', which can also be googled. Learning a few mentalism tricks can sometimes allow you to reproduce an effect that a breathless supporter of a 'psychic' might have described, which can be a very powerful way of forcing home the possibility of fraud.

As far as hypnosis goes, there is debate as to whether it is a real 'altered state'; but no-one has conclusively identified any phenomenon which can take place under hypnosis, which can't be reproduced by someone who has not been hypnotised. This has led many to consider that hypnosis, especially stage hypnosis, is more of an exercise in going along with things for various reasons (conformity, embarrassment), rather than a magical state of being under someone's control.

So yeah, if you have any specific things you'd like a comment on, there are lots of us here who like commenting :) Or you can google lots of these terms and find loads of stuff.

I think it's really good that you're taking this opportunity to check stuff out for your kids - sceptic takes on apparently supernatural phenomena can not only help later on in avoiding being scammed, but can also be a great introduction to science and the scientific method, in a much more accessible way sometimes than trying to work out resistance in ohms of a hypothetical circuit, or something.

[ObscureReferenceMan]

A great first person account can be found right on this very site.
http://www.randi.org/swift/current/psychic.html

After a little help from Penn & Teller, Kari Coleman poses as a psychic. And does a pretty good job!

[DrMatt]

In general, conjurers don't like to expose their tricks, for the simple reason that most tricks can be done multiple ways, so a little bit of knowledge is dangerous and confusing to non-experts. If you know one way of doing Trick X and along comes a performer and does it another way so you can't detect how it was done, you may mistakenly think now This performer is the Real Thing.

About the best you can reliably get conjurers to do is say "yes, I can think of ways of doing that with trickery", or, if you're lucky and they're nearby, get them to actually do it via trickery.

[drfrank]

About the best you can reliably get conjurers to do is say "yes, I can think of ways of doing that with trickery", or, if you're lucky and they're nearby, get them to actually do it via trickery.

I'm a (very) amateur magician, but replicated some of the classic Sai Baba style Vibhuti production with instant coffee grains for my ex-girlfriend. She still believes in all kind of woo, but hopefully I helped her recognise magic tricks in future ;)

[Psiload]

Hi all; I am a new poster here. Last week at my son's high school they were entertained by a psychic/hypnotist. The children came home convinced of this guy's authenticity. I am wondering if there are any good online resources that will expose the "tricks of the trade" of these characters. Thank you John.

If that were my child's school, I would be at the very next school board meeting calling for the head of whatever teacher or school administrator allowed a "psychic" to perform before a group of children.

What's next week's assembly? A cult leader? Vodoo preistess? Amway salesman? Dennis Lee?

Re-goshdarned-diculous.