Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there

by Richard Wiseman

  A good cold reader exploits your egocentric thinking by telling you how wonderful you are. Mr D’s readings were full of flattery. After just a few moments glancing at Lisa’s palm, Mr D told her that she had a good imagination, possessed lots of creative flair and had an eye for detail. A few moments later Lisa learned that she could have been a psychic because she was very intuitive, had the unusual ability of giving her opinions about people without hurting their feelings, and was a very caring person. Each time she heard compliments like these, the Lake Wobegon effect kicked in, leaving Lisa with no explanation for Mr D’s allegedly accurate insights into her personality.

  But cold readings are not just about visiting Lake Wobegon. They also involve the little-known ‘Dartmouth Indians versus the Princeton Tigers’ effect.

  2. Seeing What You Want To See

  In 1951 American University football team the Dartmouth Indians played the Princeton Tigers. It was an especially rough game, with Princeton’s quarterback suffering a broken nose and a Dartmouth player being stretchered off with a broken leg. However, newspapers from each of the two Universities presented very different descriptions of the game, with the Dartmouth journalists describing how the Princeton players had caused the problems, while the Princeton journalists were convinced that the Dartmouth team were to blame. Was this simply media bias? Intrigued, social psychologists Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril tracked down Dartmouth and Princeton students who had been at the game and interviewed them about what they had seen.9 Even though they had been watching exactly the same event, the two groups focused on different aspects of the action, resulting in vastly differing views about what had happened. For example, when asked whether the Dartmouth team started the rough play, 36 per cent of the Dartmouth students ticked the ‘yes’ box versus 86 per cent of the Princeton students. Likewise, just 8 per cent of the Dartmouth students thought that the Dartmouth team were unnecessarily rough, compared to 35 per cent of the Princeton students. Researchers have discovered that the same phenomenon (referred to as ‘selective memory’) occurs in many different contexts – when people with strong beliefs are presented with ambiguous information relevant to their views, they will see what they want to see.

  This ‘Dartmouth Indians versus the Princeton Tigers’ effect also helps explain the success of Lisa’s reading. When Mr D first looked at her hand, he spoke about many aspects of Lisa’s personality, with lots of his statements predicting both one trait and the exact opposite. Lisa was told that she was both highly sensitive yet also very down-to-earth, and that although many people saw her as shy in reality she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind. In the same way that the Dartmouth and Princeton students remembered the parts of the football game that matched their preconceptions, so Lisa focused on the aspects of Mr D’s statements that she believed applied to her and paid almost no attention to all of the incorrect information. Lisa heard what she wanted to hear, and came away convinced of Mr D’s mysterious powers.

  Following hot on the heels of the ‘Lake Wobegon’ effect, and ‘Dartmouth Indians versus the Princeton Tigers’ effect, is the third key principle of cold reading, the ‘Doctor Fox’effect.

  3. The Creation of Meaning

  Look at the symbol below.

  If the letter ‘A’ is placed on one side of the symbol, and the letter ‘C’ on the other, most people have no problem interpreting the symbol as a ‘B’.

  However, if the number ‘12’ is placed above the symbol, and the number ‘14’ below, the mysterious symbol shape-shifts into a ‘13’.

  Or you could be especially sneaky, and place the letters ‘A’ and ‘C’ to the left and right, and the numbers ‘12’ and ‘14’ above and below, and suddenly the symbol continually flips between being the letter ‘B’ and the number ‘13’.

  All of this nicely illustrates a fundamental quirk of the human perceptual system. Given the right context, people are skilled at instantly and unconsciously seeing meaning in a meaningless shape. The same principle helps people see all sorts of images in inkblots, clouds and toasted waffles. Stare at these random shapes for long enough and suddenly objects, faces and figures will start to emerge.

  The same process occurs during our everyday conversations. When you chat with someone, the two of you try your best to convey your thoughts to one another. Some of your comments might be somewhat vague and ambiguous, but the human brain is pretty good at inferring meaning from the context of the conversation, and so all is well. However, this vital process can go into overdrive, causing you to hear meaning where there is none.

  In the 1970s Donald Naftulin and his colleagues from the University of Southern California demonstrated the power of this principle in dramatic fashion.10 Naftulin wrote a completely meaningless lecture on the relationship between mathematics and human behaviour, arranged for an actor to present the talk at an education conference, and then asked the audience of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers what they thought. Prior to the talk Naftulin had the actor carefully rehearse his lines and coached him on how to deal with the thirty-minute question and answer session by using ‘double talk, neologisms, non sequiturs, and contradictory statements’. At the conference Naftulin introduced the actor as ‘Dr Myron L. Fox’ and briefly reviewed his impressive, but entirely fictitious, curriculum vitae. For the next hour and a half the audience were bombarded with meaningless drivel and contradictory statements. At the end of the session Naftulin handed out a questionnaire and asked everyone for feedback.

  In the same way that you saw a meaningless symbol a few moments ago but interpreted it as either the letter ‘B’ or number ‘13’, so the audience perceived great wisdom in Dr Fox’s nonsense. According to those in attendance, Dr Fox had given an ‘excellent presentation’, was ‘extremely articulate’, and had presented a ‘good analysis of the subject’. When asked to rate the talk, 85 per cent of the audience indicated that the incomprehensible Dr Fox had presented his material in a well-organized way, 70 per cent commended him on his use of examples, and almost 95 per cent found the talk stimulating.

  Naftulin is not the only one to expose the human mind’s wonderful ability to make something from nothing. In the mid-1960s MIT artificial intelligence expert Joseph Weizenbaum created a computer program that aimed to reproduce the experience of going to a psychotherapist. Named ELIZA (after Eliza Doolittle, the working-class flower seller who was taught how to speak proper in Pygmalion), the resulting program was very straightforward. At the start of each session, ELIZA asked people to state their problem, and then used a small number of simple rules to respond to different types of sentence. For example, if someone typed a comment with the structure ‘I have just x’, ELIZA would always reply ‘You say you have just x?’ Whenever the person said the words ‘I think so’, ELIZA responded with ‘Do you say you think so for some special reason?’ If someone’s comment didn’t match one of these standard forms, ELIZA was programmed to come out with a stock phrase, such as ‘Tell me more.’ So, imagine that you came to consult with ELIZA about a recent career change. The session might run something like this:

  ELIZA: Please state your problem.

  You: I have just changed jobs.

  ELIZA: You say you have just changed jobs?

  You: Yes, I am not sure I have made the right decision.

  ELIZA: You seem to be quite positive.

  You: I think so.

  ELIZA: Can you elaborate on that?

  You: Well, it feels like the right thing to do.

  ELIZA: I’m not sure I understand you fully.

  You: I am the sort of person that trusts my gut feelings.

  ELIZA: Your gut feelings?

  You: Yes, you know, when you have a hunch.

  ELIZA: You are sure.

  You: I think so.

  ELIZA: Do you say you think so for some special reason?

  You: Well, I do worry I was better off in my old job.

  ELIZA: Were you really?

  You: In some ways, yes.

>   ELIZA: I see.

  Despite presenting people with a series of these completely meaningless statements, ELIZA proved extremely popular and convinced many people that they were indeed chatting to a genuine and experienced psychotherapist.

  Similarly, politicians are also well aware of this effect, and often present the public with vague, ambiguous and even contradictory phrases, safe in the knowledge that voters will hear what they want to hear. (‘We must be prepared to look back and have the courage to move forward, to acknowledge the rights of both workers and organizations alike, to support those in need without encouraging people to rely on the State’.) Even academics are not immune from the effect. In the mid-1990s physicist Alan Sokal from New York University thought that the same type of gobbledegook lay behind much postmodern cultural study, and decided to test his theory by submitting a completely meaningless article to an academic journal in the area.11 The submission, entitled ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’, consisted of irrelevant references, random quotations, and outright nonsense. For example, part of the article argued that quantum gravity had political implications and the piece concluded by noting: ‘As yet no such emancipatory mathematics exists, and we can only speculate upon its eventual content. We can see hints of it in the multidimensional and non-linear logic of fuzzy systems theory; but this approach is still heavily marked by its origins in the crisis of late-capitalist production relations.’ The editors of the journal failed to identify the hoax and published the article.

  This simple idea helps account for the success of psychic readings. Many of the comments made by psychics and mediums are ambiguous, and therefore open to several interpretations. When, for example, the psychic mentions picking up on ‘a big change concerning property’, they might be referring to moving house, helping someone else move house, inheriting a house, finding a new place to rent, or even buying an overseas holiday home. Because there is no timescale on the comment this move might have happened in the recent past, be happening right now or be going to happen in the near future. Clients work hard to make sense of such comments. They think back over their lives and try to find something that matches. In doing so, they can convince themselves that the psychic is very accurate. This process is often set in motion from the very start of the reading, with many psychics making it quite clear that they will not be able to deliver precise information. Instead, they claim that the process is like looking through smoked glass, or only just being able to hear voices in the darkness. It is up to the client to help out by filling in the gaps. Just like Dr Fox and ELIZA, the psychic then produces meaningless drivel that their clients transform into pearls of wisdom. Researcher Geoffrey Dean describes this phenomenon as ‘The Procrustean Effect’, after the mythical Greek figure who stretched or severed the limbs of his guests to ensure that they fitted into his bed.12

  Mr D’s readings were jammed full of such comments. Lisa was told that she was ‘connected with something of a caring nature’, that she was ‘going through some sort of change in the workplace’, that someone in her life was ‘being especially difficult’, and that she had recently received ‘a gift from a young child’. One of the most dramatic moments in the reading came when Mr D told her that her brother had enjoyed a great deal of career success, and was considering joining an organization that would help him achieve even more. Mr D had no idea what he was talking about. His comment could, for example, have referred to Lisa’s brother changing jobs, or becoming a member of a professional organization, gym, sports team, private club, or a trade union. However, Lisa’s brother had recently been asked to join the Masons and so she interpreted Mr D’s comments in that context. When we interviewed her afterwards, Lisa was especially impressed with this part of the reading, and misremembered Mr D’s comments as explicitly referring to her brother and a Masonic Lodge.

  So of the six psychological techniques that cold reading capitalizes on we have explored the ‘Lake Wobegon’ effect, the ‘Dartmouth Indians versus the Princeton Tigers’ effect, and the ‘Doctor Fox’ effect. Let’s take a break before we look at the fourth key principle of cold reading . . .

  HOW TO CONVINCE STRANGERS THAT YOU KNOW ALL ABOUT THEM: PART ONE

  Now it is time for you to master the psychological techniques used by professional psychics for your own wicked purposes. Before you start, decide what 'skill' you are going to appear to possess. It is best to choose something that appeals to the person that you are trying to impress. So if, for example, you think they are open to the idea of palmistry say that you can tell a great deal about them from the lines on their hand. If they are into astrology, explain that you can determine their past and future from their date of birth. Or, if they are sceptical about all matters paranormal, ask them to draw a picture of a house and use this as the basis for a 'psychological' reading.

  Next, practise using the following three techniques:

  1. Flattery

  Start by telling them what they want to hear. Look at their palm, date of birth or drawing of a house, and explain that it reflects a very well-balanced personality. Try your best to keep a straight face as you appear to dig deeper, explaining that they appear to be terribly caring, responsible, friendly, creative, and polite. Also, don't forget to mention that they also seem to be highly intuitive, and so would be good at providing readings for others.

  2. Double-headed statements

  If you describe any trait and its exact opposite, people will only focus on the part of your description that makes sense to them. Work your way through the following five key personality dimensions using these double-headed sentences:

  Openness: 'At times you can be imaginative and creative, but are more than capable of being practical and down-to-earth when necessary.'

  Conscientiousness: 'You value a sense of routine in some aspects of your life, but at other times enjoy being spontaneous and unpredictable.'

  Extroversion: 'You can be outgoing when you want to, but sometimes enjoy nothing better than a night in with a good book.'

  Agreeableness: 'Your friends see you as trusting and friendly, but you do have a more competitive side that emerges from time to time.'

  Neuroticism: 'Although you feel emotionally insecure and stressed, in general you are fairly relaxed and laid-back.'

  3. Keep it vague

  Although it is fine to drop in the odd specific statement ('Do you have a sister called Joanne, an irrational fear of porridge, and have you recently bought a yellow secondhand car ... I thought not'), in general it is better to keep your comments vague. To help account for this vagueness, tell people that you sometimes struggle to understand the thoughts and images that cross your mind, and therefore they have to help you figure out what is going on.

  In terms of actual statements, try, 'I am getting the impression of a significant change, perhaps a journey of some sort or an upheaval in the workplace', 'You have recently received a gift of some sort - perhaps money or something that has sentimental value?', 'I have a feeling that you are worried about a member of your family or a close friend?' Similarly, feel free to come out with abstract statements, such as 'I can see a circle closing - does that make sense to you?', 'I can see a door shutting - no matter how hard you pull it won't open' or 'I can see cleaning -are you trying to remove something or someone from your life?'

  Now, let’s resume our exploration of the principles of cold reading by going fishing.

  4. Using the ‘F Words’

  During everyday conversations most people try their best to communicate their thoughts and opinions. However, even if just one person is speaking and another person is listening, information is not only flowing from the speaker to the listener. Instead, the conversation will always be a two-way process, with the listener constantly providing feedback to the speaker. Perhaps they will let the speaker know that they understand, and perhaps agree with, what is being said by nodding, smiling or saying ‘yes’. Or maybe they will let the speaker kn
ow that they are confused, or don’t agree with a comment, by looking confused, shaking their head, or saying ‘you are a fool, please go away’. Either way, such feedback is vital to the success of our everyday conversations.

  Psychics and mediums take this simple idea to the extreme. During a reading they will often make several comments, see which gets a reaction and elaborate on the selected option. Like a good politician or second-hand car salesman, they are not saying what is on their mind, but rather testing the water and then changing their message on the basis of the feedback they receive. This feedback can take many different forms. They may look at whether their client nods, smiles, leans forward in their seat, or suddenly become tense, and alter their comments accordingly (this is one of the reasons that palmists are keen to hold your hand during a reading). The technique is referred to as ‘fishing and forking’, and Mr D was a master practitioner.

  People tend to consult psychics about a relatively small number of potential problems, such as their health, relationships, travel plans, career, or finances. As Mr D worked his way through the Tarot cards he mentioned each of the topics and surreptitiously observed Lisa’s reaction. She looked in good health and didn’t really respond when he mentioned her having a few aches and pains. Questions about her career didn’t produce much of a reaction. He then mentioned travelling but Lisa remained unmoved. Finally, he moved on to Lisa’s emotional life. The moment he mentioned companionship Lisa’s entire demeanour changed, and she suddenly looked very serious. Mr D immediately knew he was on to something and started to drill deeper. He looked at the lines on Lisa’s palm, remarked on an imaginary blip in the heart line, and said that he wasn’t certain whether it reflected a death in the family or a relationship that didn’t work out. Lisa was completely unresponsive when he mentioned the death, but nodded as soon as she heard about the broken relationship. Mr D secretly noted the response and moved on. About ten minutes later he picked up another Tarot card and confidently announced that it showed that she had recently broken up with her partner. Lisa was stunned.