Cold reading

The teaching

As Ian Rowland's Full Facts Book of Cold Reading (1998) teaches it.

Sounding as if you know

Cold reading is the craft of talking to a stranger so that it sounds as though you know all about them. Ian Rowland, a performer who uses it openly, sets it out piece by piece so that it can be recognised. It needs no prior knowledge, no accomplice and no crude trick. It works by statements that fit most people, by watching how each one lands, by drawing information from the sitter without seeming to, and by letting the sitter's own memory finish the work. Hot reading is a different thing: finding out about the sitter beforehand.

Setting the stage

The psychologist Ray Hyman set out the reader's working rules. The first is confidence: a reader who acts convinced can sell a weak reading. The reader presents themselves modestly, so that the sitter is not on guard, and wins the sitter's cooperation in advance, explaining that the reading depends on the sitter's help and that any miss is a failure of interpretation, not of the reading. A prop, cards, a palm or a chart, gives the reader time to think and a reason to watch the sitter's hands and face.

The reader keeps their eyes open: clothes, jewellery, posture, accent and speech all carry information. Above all the reader listens, for sitters often come wanting a sympathetic ear, or support for a decision already half made, and will say a great deal if allowed.

Statements that fit nearly everyone

A reading usually opens with stock phrases, statements so general that almost anyone would accept them as true of themselves: that one has a great need to be liked and admired, that one is hard on oneself, that one has talents not yet used, that one is sociable at times and reserved at others. Hyman calls a set of these a stock spiel. Delivered with confidence, as if made for this person alone, such a sketch is accepted as strikingly accurate, which psychology calls the Barnum effect.

The rainbow ruse

Rowland's rainbow ruse is a statement that credits the sitter with a trait and its opposite: you are punctual and reliable, though there are times when you run late; you can be the life of the party, though deep down you are rather shy. Since everyone has both sides, everyone hears the half that fits and remembers the reading as accurate. To recognise it, listen for the though, the but, the at other times.

The Jacques statement

Rowland names another kind the Jacques statement, after the melancholy Jaques of As You Like It, whose speech divides a life into seven ages. It is fitted to the sitter's stage of life rather than to the sitter: to someone of about forty, that they have been taking stock lately and wondering whether the path they chose was the right one; to someone young, that they feel pulled between what others expect of them and what they want. It sounds personal and is true of most people of that age.

The fuzzy fact and fishing

With the fuzzy fact, in Rowland's phrase, the reader supplies the words and the sitter supplies the meaning: I'm sensing a connection with a relative living overseas, or I'm getting the letter M. The sitter searches their own life for a fit and finds one, Mary, Michael, a mother, an uncle abroad, and even a near miss is often accepted. The reader then narrows the fact by the sitter's response, as if it had been specific all along.

Fishing, in Hyman's account, is simply a device for getting the sitter to tell you about themselves. Statements are put half as questions, a sense of some worry about health lately, perhaps, and the reader watches for the reaction, builds on what is confirmed and drops what is not. A related turn, known as the vanishing negative, asks in the negative: you don't work with children, do you? If the answer is yes, the reader knew it; if no, the reader thought not. Either answer is a hit.

Reading the reply

The sitter is the reader's real source. A nod, an intake of breath, a softening of the shoulders, a widening of the eyes, a correction offered freely: each tells the reader which way to go. Hits are built on and dramatised, and misses are let go quickly and seldom revisited. Over half an hour a reading can steer itself almost entirely by these signals, and the reader need not know they are doing it.

Handling the misses

A reader has many ways to turn a miss. The commonest moves it in time: if it has not happened yet, it is likely to come up soon, which Rowland calls a time revision, one of several revisions he describes by which a statement is never quite wrong. Others move it to someone else, a relative or a friend, or ask the sitter to think about it later, when it will surely make sense. And many readings end in hope, as Rowland's Pollyanna pearl does, with the promise that a hard area of life is about to improve.

What they want to hear

Hyman's last rules are the most human. Always give the impression that you know more than you are saying. Flatter freely. And tell the sitter what they want to hear, since the best-remembered readings foretell what the sitter secretly hopes. Afterwards the sitter's memory does the rest: they recall the hits, forget the misses, and remember as the reader's the details they supplied themselves.

Recognising it kindly

Many readers who use these methods do not know that they do. The craft can be learned by trial and error, reading after reading, and sincerely taken for a gift. The point of knowing it is to recognise it, kindly, and to see that a convincing reading is not, by itself, evidence of anything more. After any reading, the plainest check is to set it down sentence by sentence and ask which statements were exact enough to be wrong.