Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

chest." Subject says, "It was a heart attack." "Heart attack? Yes, that explains the chest pains." Or, "I'm sensing a drowning. Was there a boat involved? I'm seeing a boat of some kind on a body of water, maybe a lake or river." And so on. In an audience of two hundred fifty people; every major cause of death will be represented.
    The principles of cold-reading are simple: start general (car accidents, drownings, heart attacks, cancer), keep it positive ("He wants you to know he loves you very much," "She says to tell you that she is no longer suffering," "His pain is gone now"), and know that your audience will remember the hits and forget the misses ("How did she know it was cancer?" "How did he get her name?"). But how did Rosemary Altea, without asking, know that the woman's mother had died of cancer and that her son was having doubts about his career? For Oprah, two hundred fifty studio eyewitnesses, and millions of television viewers, Altea appeared to have a direct line to the spirit world.
    The explanation is very much of this world, however. Mentalists call this a hot reading where you actually obtain information on your subject ahead of time. Earlier that day, I had shared a limousine from the hotel to the studio with several guests on the show, two of whom were this woman and her son. During the drive, they mentioned that they had met with Altea before and had been invited by Oprah's producers to share their experience with the television audience. Since almost no one knew this little fact, Altea could use her prior knowledge of the woman and her son to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Naturally I pointed out this fact but, incredibly, the woman denied having previously met with Altea and the exchange was simply edited out of the show.
    I doubt that Altea deliberately deceives her audiences by consciously using cold-reading techniques. Rather, I believe she innocently developed a belief in her own "psychic powers" and innocently learned cold-reading by trial and error. She says it all began in November 1981, when "I woke early one morning to find him standing by the bed, looking down at me. Although I was still half asleep, I knew he was no apparition, no specter in the night" (1995, p. 56). From there, as her book reveals, it was a long process of becoming open to the possibility of a spirit world through what psychologists call hypnopompic hallucinations —visions of ghosts, aliens, or loved ones that occur as one emerges from deep sleep—and mystical interpretations of unusual experiences.
    But whether we are talking about rats pressing a bar to get food or humans playing a Las Vegas slot machine, it only takes an occasional hit to keep them coming back for more. Altea's belief and behavior were shaped by operant conditioning on a variable-ratio schedule of reinforcement—lots of misses but just enough hits to shape and maintain the behavior. Positive feedback in the form of happy customers paying up to $200 per session was a mechanism sufficient to reinforce her own belief in her powers and to encourage her to hone her mentalist skills.
    The same explanation probably holds for the master of cold-reading in the psychic world—James Van Praagh—who wowed audiences for months on NBC's New Age talk show The Other Side, until he was debunked on Unsolved Mysteries. Here's how. I was asked to sit in a room with nine other people. Van Praagh was asked to do a reading on each of us, all of whom had lost a loved one. I worked closely with the producers to ensure that Van Praagh would have no prior knowledge of any of us. (In addition to subscribing to demographic marketing journals so that they can make statistically educated guesses about subjects based on age, gender, race, and residence, mentalists have been known to go as far as running a name through a detective agency.) His readings would have to be "cold" indeed. The session lasted eleven hours and included several snack breaks, an extended lunch