It is almost time to depart. Prepare to enter a world where anything appears possible and yet nothing is ever quite what it seems. A world where the truth really is stranger than fiction. A world that I have had the pleasure of calling home for the past twenty years.
Hurry now, there’s a storm brewing, and we are about to begin our journey into a world far more wonderful than Oz . . .
1. FORTUNE-TELLING
In which we meet the mysterious ‘Mr D’, visit the
non-existent town of Lake Wobegon, find out how to
convince strangers that we know all about them
and discover who we really are.
For reasons that will soon become apparent, it wouldn’t be fair to give Mr D’s real name. Born in the north of England in 1934, this remarkable man spent much of his life working as a professional psychic and developed a considerable reputation for highly accurate readings. When I was studying at Edinburgh University, Mr D contacted me and asked whether I would be interested in watching him give some readings. I immediately accepted the kind offer and invited Mr D to the University so that I could film him at work. A few weeks later the two of us met in the foyer of the Psychology Department. I showed him into my laboratory and explained that I had lined up several volunteers who were eager to take part in a psychic reading. Mr D quietly set up his table, took out his Tarot cards and crystal ball, and waited for his first guinea pig. A few moments later the door opened and in walked a 43-year-old barmaid named Lisa. I pressed the ‘record’ button on the video camera and retreated to the other side of a two-way mirror.
Mr D knew nothing about Lisa before the reading. He started by asking her to hold out her right hand, palm up. After carefully examining her palm with a horn-handled magnifying glass, Mr D started to describe her personality. Within seconds Lisa was nodding and smiling. He next asked her to shuffle a deck of Tarot cards and then place them in the centre of the table. Mr D turned over one card after another and spoke about each in turn. Within a few minutes he told Lisa that she had a brother and described his career in considerable detail. A few moments later Mr D said that he thought Lisa had recently broken up from a long-term relationship.
Lisa’s reading lasted around ten minutes. When she left the laboratory I interviewed her about what she thought about her time with Mr D. Lisa was extremely impressed, and explained how Mr D had been correct about her personality, recent relationship difficulties and brother’s career. When I asked Lisa to rate the accuracy of Mr D’s reading she gave it top marks.
Throughout the morning several other people came away equally convinced that Mr D possessed uncanny powers. After a spot of lunch, Mr D watched the recordings of his readings and explained more about his abilities. It proved a fascinating and eye-opening experience. In just a few hours Mr D not only provided a rare glimpse into the world of the professional psychic, but also revealed how almost anyone could learn to develop such powers. At the end of the day Mr D packed away his Tarot cards and said goodbye. Unfortunately, I never met Mr D again because he suffered a sudden and fatal heart attack a few years later. However, the day that I spent with him lives on in my mind, and we will return to the secret behind his seemingly magical gift of insight later in the chapter.
Laboratory footage of Mr D at work
www.richardwiseman.com/paranormality/MrD.html
Every year millions of people visit psychics and come away completely convinced that these individuals have the ability to see deep within their souls. Are they kidding themselves, the victims of elaborate scams, or is something genuinely spooky going on? To find out, a small number of researchers have put the alleged paranormal powers of psychics and mediums under the microscope, of whom the most notable investigator is magician and arch-sceptic, James Randi.
Séance on a Warm
Wednesday Afternoon
Randall James Hamilton Zwinge was born in Toronto in 1928.1 When he was 12 years old, he happened to catch a matinée performance by a well-known American magician named Harry Blackstone Sr. The bug bit deep, and Zwinge found out as much as he could about the secretive world of magic and eventually started to perform on a regular basis.
Like many magicians, Zwinge was a tad sceptical about matters paranormal. When he was 15 he went along to his local spiritualist church and was disgusted by what he witnessed. People in the congregation were encouraged to bring along sealed envelopes containing questions to their deceased loved ones. The ministers then secretly read the messages and created a fake reply from the ‘dead’. Zwinge attempted to expose the deception, but upset the ministers and ended up spending time at the local police station.
Unperturbed, he eventually grew a goatee, legally changed his name to James ‘The Amazing’ Randi, and embarked on a long and colourful career as a professional magician and escapologist. Over the years Randi has been involved in a series of headline-grabbing projects, including remaining in a sealed metal coffin for 104 minutes (breaking Houdini’s record by just over ten minutes), clocking up 22 appearances on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show, featuring in an episode of Happy Days, escaping from a straitjacket while hanging upside-down over Niagara Falls, and appearing to behead rock legend Alice Cooper on a nightly basis.
In tandem with his magic career, Randi continued his crusade against paranormal chicanery. His investigations gained such momentum and notoriety that in 1996 he established the James Randi Educational Foundation. The website promotes itself as ‘an educational resource on the paranormal, pseudoscientific and the supernatural’ and it also offers a bold challenge to would-be psychics or those professing to have paranormal powers. A million dollar challenge to be precise.
In the late 1960s Randi appeared on a radio chat show explaining why he thought that those claiming paranormal powers were either deluding themselves or deceiving others. One panellist, a parapsychologist, suggested that he put his money where his mouth was by offering a cash prize to anyone who could show that they had genuine psychic abilities. Randi took up the challenge and put up $1,000. Over the years Randi’s offer grew to $100,000 and then, in the late 1990s, a wealthy supporter of his Foundation increased the prize fund to one million dollars to anyone who can demonstrate the existence of paranormal abilities to the satisfaction of an independent panel (so far, no one has). But for over a decade this opportunity to become an instant millionaire has attracted a steady stream of applicants, including psychics who claim to be able to guess the order of shuffled decks of cards, dowsers who say they can use bent coat hangers and forked sticks to discover underground water, and even a woman who tried to use the power of her mind to make strangers urinate. That, too, was a failure . . .
In 2008 a British medium called Patricia Putt applied for Randi’s million-dollar challenge. Putt was convinced that she was able to garner information about the living by chatting with their deceased friends and relatives. Randi asked me and Chris French, a Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths College in London, to test Putt’s abilities.2
Putt lives in Essex and is an experienced medium who has given both personal and group readings for several years. According to her website, much of this work has been carried out with the invaluable assistance of her Egyptian spirit guide ‘Ankhara’, whom she first encountered while participating in a regression hypnotherapy session. Putt’s website also describes many instances where she has apparently provided undeniable proof of the spirit world, as well as listing several television and radio programmes that have enlisted her services.
After much discussion, Putt, French and I agreed on the details of the test. It was to take place on one day and involve ten volunteers. Putt would not know any of these people in advance, and would attempt to contact a deceased friend or relative of each volunteer, and then use this spirit to determine information about the volunteer’s personality and life.
The big day arrived. Each of the volunteers was scheduled to arrive at French’s laboratory at different times throughout the day. To minimize the possibility of
Putt picking up any information about the volunteers by the way they looked or dressed, French had them remove any watches and jewellery, don a full-length black cape, and put on a black balaclava.
Each volunteer was shown into the test room and asked to sit in a chair facing a wall. Putt then came in, sat at a desk on the opposite side of the room and attempted to make contact with the spirit world. Once she thought she had a direct line to the dead, Putt located a spirit that knew the person and then quietly wrote down information about the volunteer. My role in the test was to bring Putt in and out of the test room at appropriate times, stay with her as she attempted to contact the spirits, and to generally keep her company throughout the day. Putt and I spent much of the time between the sessions chatting. At one point I asked her if there was a downside to working as a professional psychic. Without a hint of irony she explained how annoying it was when people made an appointment to see her but then failed to show up.
A volunteer takes part in Patricia Putt’s test.
After Putt had completed all ten sessions the volunteers were asked to return to the test room. They were each given transcriptions of all of the readings that Putt had made that day and were asked to look through them and identify the reading that seemed to apply to them. If Putt really had the powers she claimed, the volunteers should have had an easy time. For example, let’s imagine that one of them had been brought up in the country, had spent a significant amount of time travelling in France, and had recently married an actor. If Putt really did have a direct line to the spirit world, then she might have mentioned a childhood surrounded by greenery, the strong whiff of brie, or the phrase, ‘darling, it was a triumph’. Once the person saw those comments they would instantly know that that reading was intended for them, and so would have no problem choosing it from the pack. In order for Putt to pass the test, five or more of the volunteers had to correctly identify their reading.
Each volunteer carefully examined Putt’s readings and identified the one that they found most accurate. We all then gathered in French’s office to see how Putt had scored. Volunteer One had chosen a reading that had been meant for Volunteer Seven. The reading selected by Volunteer Two was actually made when Volunteer Six was sitting in front of Putt. And so it went on. In fact, none of the volunteers correctly identified their reading. Putt was stunned by the result but has vowed to return with a new and improved claim.3
Interview with Prof. Chris French
www.richardwiseman.com/paranormality/ChrisFrench.html
You could argue that Putt failed because she agreed to work under an artificial set of conditions. After all, unless she gets a gig at an introverted amateur Batman look-a-like convention, she will rarely be asked to produce readings for people who are dressed in a black cape, wearing a black balaclava, and facing away from her. The problem is that other experiments conducted in more natural settings have yielded the same result.
In the early 1980s psychologists Hendrik Boerenkamp and Sybo Schouten from the University of Utrecht spent five years studying the alleged paranormal powers of 12 well-respected Dutch psychics.4
The researchers visited each psychic in their home several times each year (‘Is he expecting you?’), showed the psychic a photograph of someone that they had never met and asked them to provide information about that person. They also carried out exactly the same procedure with a group of randomly selected people who didn’t claim to be psychic. After recording and analysing over 10,000 statements, the researchers concluded that the allegedly paranormal powers of the psychics failed to outperform the random guesses made by the non-psychic control group, and that neither group produced impressive hit rates.
These types of failed studies are not the exception, they are the norm.5
For over a century researchers have tested the claims of mediums and psychics and found them wanting. Indeed, after reviewing this vast amount of work, Sybo Schouten concluded that the psychics’ performance was simply no better than chance. It seems that when it comes to psychics and mediums, Randi’s million-dollar prize is safe.
The conundrum is that surveys suggest that around one in six people believe they have received an accurate reading from an alleged psychic.6
To solve the mystery it is necessary to learn the secrets of the psychic readers. There are several ways of doing this. You could, for example, spend several weeks on a psychic development programme attempting to open your inner eye. Or you could enrol on a month-long course at a college for mediumship and try to tune into the dead. Alternatively, you could save yourself a great deal of time and effort by forgetting all about that. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, most mediums and psychics use a fascinating set of psychological techniques to give the impression that they have a magical insight into the past, present and future. These techniques are referred to as ‘cold reading’, and they reveal an important insight into the fundamental nature of our everyday interactions. To find out about them we are going to spend some more time with a familiar friend of ours.
Revealing the Mysterious Mr D
Before continuing our journey into the psychology of psychic readings I would like you to take the following two-part psychological test.
First, imagine that the illustration below represents an aerial view of a large sandpit. Next, imagine that someone has randomly chosen a place in the pit and buried some treasure there. You have just one opportunity to dig down and find the treasure. Without thinking about it too much, place an ‘X’ in the sandpit to indicate where you would dig.
Second, simply think of one geometric shape inside another. Many thanks. We will return to your answers later on.
At the start of the chapter I described how Mr D once visited Edinburgh University and demonstrated his amazing abilities. In reading after reading, complete strangers sat down opposite him and left convinced that he knew all about them. One of the most impressive readings was given to Lisa, who had no idea how Mr D had come up with accurate information about her personality, her brother’s career and her recent relationship difficulties.
As you might have guessed by now, Mr D did not possess genuine paranormal powers. In fact, he had spent much of his life using cold reading to fake psychic ability, and was happy to reveal the tricks of his trade. Mr D used six psychological techniques to appear to achieve the impossible.7
To understand the first of these we need to travel to the non-existent town of Lake Wobegon.
1. Flattery Will Get You Everywhere
In the mid-1980s American writer and humorist Garrison Keillor created a fictional town called Lake Wobegon. According to Keillor, Lake Wobegon is located in the centre of Minnesota but can’t be found on maps because of the incompetence of nineteenth-century surveyors. When describing the townsfolk, Keillor noted that ‘all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average’. Although written in jest, Keillor’s comment reflects a key psychological principle now referred to as the ‘Lake Wobegon effect’.
Much of the time you make rational decisions. However, under certain circumstances your brain trips you up, and you suddenly let go of logic. Psychologists discovered that a major cause of irrationality revolves around a curious phenomenon known as the ‘egocentric bias’. Nearly all of us have fragile egos and use various techniques to protect ourselves from the harsh reality of the outside world. We are highly skilled at convincing ourselves that we are responsible for the success in our lives, but equally good at blaming failures on other people. We fool ourselves into believing that we are unique, possess above average abilities and skills, and are likely to experience more than our fair share of good fortune in the future. The effects of egocentric thinking can be dramatic. In perhaps the best-known example, researchers asked each member of long-term couples to estimate the percentage of the housework they carried out. The combined total from almost every pair exceeded 100 per cent. Each had displayed an egocentric bias by focusing on their own work and downplaying their partner’s
contribution.
For the most part, this egotism is good for you. It makes you feel positive about yourself, motivates you to get up in the morning, helps you deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and persuades you to carry on when the going gets tough. For example, research has shown that people are unrealistically optimistic about both their personality and abilities. 94 per cent of people think that they have an above average sense of humour, 80 per cent of drivers say that they are more skilled than the average driver (remarkably, this is even true of those that are in hospital because they have been involved in a road accident), and 75 per cent of business people see themselves as more ethical than the average businessman.8 It is the same when it comes to personality. Present people with any positive trait and they are quick to tick the ‘yes, that’s me’ box, leading to the vast majority of people irrationally believing themselves to be far more cooperative, considerate, responsible, friendly, reliable, resourceful, polite and dependable than the average person. These delusions are the price that we pay for the happiness, success and resilience that we enjoy in the rest of our lives.
Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there Page 2