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In general terms
According to Derren Brown, it's easy – but it's not fortune-telling. When Derren walks through London's Carnaby Street stopping people at random and instantly exposing intimate details about their lives, he is not calling upon some mysterious psychic gift, but is using a form of mind control referred to as 'cold reading'. A well-known mentalist technique, Derren explains, 'Cold reading is when you look for responses in someone in order to narrow down possibilities. It's more of a linguistic trick: you talk to someone apparently about them but using general language that applies to everyone.'
Astrology is a good example of this where, Derren says, 'Generalisations, are used. "You're an extrovert with a shy side," could apply to absolutely anyone. You hear the things you want to hear and not those that you don't.'
Deductive reasoning
A variation of the technique can also be used to 'read' a person's life. 'When I stopped the security guard,' says Derren, 'it was more a form of deductive reading that I was using. For instance, if you look at someone's belt and it seems that they have it on a tighter notch than normal, you can see they have lost weight recently and so are probably into health and fitness. I also put myself in their shoes: what would it feel like to be them. I looked at the security guard and felt how he would like to be moving around, have space about him. It's making deductions from looking at clues,' he concludes, 'rather like Sherlock Holmes.'
We hear what we want
This was the technique used by the renowned 1940s American circus impresario and skilled psychological manipulator, P T Barnum. The eminent psychologist, B R Forer conducted a series of tests to investigate what he termed the 'Barnum effect', and concluded that 'people tend to accept vague and general personality descriptions as uniquely applicable to themselves without realising that the same description could be applied to just about anyone.'
Handing out the same personality description to each of his students, Forer asked them to mark the accuracy of the description in relation to their character on a scale of 0 to 5, with 5 signifying an excellent assessment. The students' evaluation averaged at 4.26. The same test carried out today, still produces an average mark of 4.2.
Further information
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Books
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Arts of Deception: Playing with fraud in the age of Barnum by James W Cook (Harvard University Press, 2001)
Explores some of the playful forms of fraud that astonished and outraged 19th century America's emerging middle class.
Buy this book from Amazon.
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The Elusive Quarry: A scientific appraisal of psychical research by Ray Hymann (Prometheus Books, 1989)
An analysis and critique of parapsychological experimentation.
Buy this book from Amazon.
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Flim-Flam: The truth about unicorns, parapsychology and other delusions by James Randi (Prometheus Books, 1994)
A professional magician exposes the tricks of 'mystics', 'mediums', 'psychic surgeons' and others who claim to possess supernatural or paranormal powers.
Buy this book from Amazon.
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The Skeptic's Dictionary: A collection of strange beliefs, delusions and deceptions by Todd Carroll (John Wiley & Sons, August 2003)
A compendium of all things supernatural, occult, paranormal and pseudoscientific.
Buy this book from Amazon.
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I Know What You're Thinking by Lillian Glass (John Wiley & Sons, 2002)
A practical guide to understanding what people are really thinking and gaining an insight into their personalities.
Buy this book from Amazon.
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Websites
The Forer Effect
www.skepdic.com/forer.html
Describes the work of psychologist B R Forer who concluded that people accept vague personality descriptions as uniquely applicable to themselves without realising that they could be describing just about anyone.
Cold Reading
www.skepdic.com/coldread.html
Article on techniques that get a subject to behave in a certain way or to think that the cold reader has a mysterious ability to know things about the subject.
Cold Reading: The psychic's true power
www.theness.com/coldread.html
Online article by Robert Novella, published in the journal The Connecticut Skeptic.
The Forer Effect
http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/paranormal/ bldef_forereffect.htm
Describes the experiment that psychologist B R Forer carried out on his students in 1948 plus other related articles.
Skeptic's Journal
www.skeptics.com.au/journal/coldread.htm
Australian site on the art of cold reading.
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