I recently watched a video from a self-famed psychic medium. Her business page has over 6 thousand followers and over a thousand comments on just one live video. So much of her live was classical cold-reading techniques and it inspired me to write a bit about what cold-reading is and how to watch out for it.
First of all, cold-reading is a technique that many psychics and grifters use that is a skilled expansion of how most people get their “first impressions”. First impressions are based on what our senses pick up on when we first meet a person. We observe and subconsciously catalogue their clothes, behaviors, speech, accent, height, weight, smell, mannerisms, grooming, etc. This all happens within seconds of meeting someone and forms our initial judgement or first impression of that person.
Cold-reading is the conscious expansion on those observations with knowledgeable application of behavior modification techniques. Some people are naturally good at this and can range from well-meaning, caring people to abusers. Cold-reading also is a skill set that can be learned and applied across many disciplines. For the sake of this article, I will be exploring how grifters use these skills in the psychic and medium spaces.
Why use cold-reading? Practioners who are worth their salt don’t. Cold-reading is used to build a false sense of trust and validation of the reader’s “psychic” skills. Grifters know that by in large that the only people who go to mediums are those who have lost a loved one and have unresolved emotions around that death. They are people in search of answers who are experiencing hope, grief, sadness, and fear – all of which can be manipulated and exploited. Grifters know that charisma goes a long way, as does putting themselves in a position of authority. If someone is self-assured and believes that they are really good at what they do, we are more likely to believe them.
On a one-way live, cold-reading will look like this. General and vague information about a binary gender, grandfather, mother, etc. Any kind and loving person that you’ve known is most likely to fit in this category. (And there aren’t many of us want to keep in touch with abusers or harmful people that have died.) They will have a near 50/50 chance of a hit. If they fail, they’ll simply redirect you to a masculine quality of the female person, or a way in which the male person embodied a feminine quality. The grifter will mention a sudden illness, death, or in some other way that you were not ready for the death to occur. This will be intermixed with the grifter telling successful stories of themselves as a psychic with others to set the stage to invalidate you should you disagree, which is a form of gaslighting. Another tactic is to mention a bunch of vague information rather quickly, forcing the receiver to introject the correct information and direct the flow of the conversation. Another technique that is very successful is inserting the idea that “this will make sense to you later if it does not now”. This works well because humans are prone to confirmation bias, especially in retrospect, and means that if the information is not a hit, no problem, it will be someday. All of the information will be given with the prompt of “however that makes sense to you” or “however you interpret it”. Comments on the video that are too long or contain too much identifying information will be bypassed because there is too much opportunity for the grifter to fail and not maintain coercive control over the flow of conversation. They’ll mention names randomly so even if you don’t get a reading you still know that you were seen and heard, or you are convinced that someone else on the live has had a positive hit for one of them.
How many hits do they have so far? Do you have a loved one who died whose death was jarring to those around them? Was the death tragic? Did you loose something? Do you need to find something? Are you in need of support? Do you have any health issues of your own? Could you use more love and kindness, more money, more support, more time? Yes – the thing is we ALL need all of that. Those are positive hits for almost everyone. Now all the grifter has to do is wait for your comment to pop up on the screen confirming one of these things. The minute you confirm it, the grifter can then take that information and run with it, no matter how tenuous the connection is to the information. And because you want so much to have this connection with the dead, you will see it as a proof positive sign that the person is around and that the “medium” or “psychic” is everything they claim to be.
When vetting a medium or psychic watch them for a while before interacting with them. Allow them to speak and offer zero confirmation, especially if they’ve thrown out a lot of vague or conflicting information. Listen to how they communicate. Listen to how much they bounce around, pulling information for several people, and maybe, whoops getting a couple of them confused because “the dead are all speaking at once” or “the information is coming in too quickly”. Listen to them give out information then dismiss it, then circle back and dismiss it again. If any of that was a hit, they were right, if it wasn’t a hit, they’ve already disproven it themselves. These people can be very convincing and appear to get a lot of positive hits. They are good at controlling the perception of information and the validation of people’s emotions. They will get less accurate with the less feedback they receive or say that you are blocking the information. The problem is never with them. They are always right, always.
Whenever I’ve worked with folks in the capacity of psychic or as a medium, I encourage folks to not confirm information for me until the end of a reading. I ask them not to front-load me with any information, to give me an opportunity to be wrong. I try not to watch their face and bodily movements. I read non-verbal information very well, so I want to make sure that I am not using that to the extend that I am able. I don’t give any guarantees, except that I will do my best. One, the spirit may not be around or want to engage with me or the client. There may be blocks in place that I am incapable of seeing past. I may not be the right reader for this person for a whole host of reasons or my skill level may not be good enough to complete the task. Every psychic and medium is fallible. Every one of them has limitations. Any psychic or medium that is perfect, infallible, and unable to be questioned is a fraud.
You can learn more about cold-reading online, there is even a Wiki-How on the subject. My next article will go into live cold-reading.