Mass Media Funk is a commentary on mass media stories about the scientific, the paranormal, the supernatural, and anything else that yanks at my eyebrows.
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58 profile of cold reading November 15, 2007. Psychologist Ray Hyman tells the story of how he got interested in the psychology of self-deception. He was a college student, earning money as a palm reader. He'd read several books on the art but didn't believe any of it. He got so much positive feedback from his customers, however, that he started to think that maybe he did have psychic powers. He told his psychology professor about his successful career reading people's palms. His teacher got Ray to agree to an experiment. Try telling your clients the opposite of what the books say. Ray tried it and, to his surprise, he got even more positive feedback from his customers. It turned out, he notes, that it didn't matter what he told them, his clients would figure out a way to make him right. Ray would later become an expert in understanding cold reading and subjective validation, the words we now use to describe the process of making claims with no basis in fact or study and having them validated as true by others. As a palm reader, Ray had become an adept cold reader, assisted by the efforts of his customers to selectively ignore his errors and misses and to focus on items they could make sense out of or give meaning to. As Ray notes, his clients wanted him to succeed in his reading and they would do everything in their power to help him. We now think that the processes of cold reading and subjective validation explain how psychics, psychic detectives, astrologers, tarot card readers, palm readers, graphologists, mediums, and the like work so well in the eyes of their many satisfied customers. It has also been argued that certain methods used in psychotherapy that appear to be highly accurate are actually cases of cold reading and subjective validation, e.g., Rorschach ink blot readings. Some cold reading is based on simple observation. You can tell a lot by the clothes a person wears, the person's age and gender, for example. Sometimes people tell you things about themselves and when you repeat these things they forget that they, not you, are the source of the information. Linus Paulings' Rorschach was made public and he responded to the blots in ways that anybody could read:
Some cold reading uses Barnum statements, assertions just about anyone could agree with:
Vague or ambiguous statements often work in a cold reading because they can be shoehorned to retrofit events that have already happened. Mentalist Ian Rowland has written the book (literally) on cold reading. In his Full Facts Book of Cold Reading 3rd. edition, he lists 38 different ploys to use, eleven of which are designed to extract information from the client. He gives a telling example of the essence of cold reading in explaining "the Push Statement" (statements designed to be rejected by the client at first). He was demonstrating cold reading in a TV production meeting and used "the shoe and the party" push statement (a narrative about an impression involving a shoe and a party) and the name "Charles." Nobody in the meeting could connect the name with the shoe or the party. Ten minutes after the meeting ended, a young woman very excitedly told him that she now remembers a party from her teen years at which she broke her shoe while dancing with Charlie! She was very impressed that Rowland had perceived this detail from her past that even she could hardly remember. Rowland hadn't perceived any such thing, but no matter. The story exemplifies the essence of successful cold reading: This works because our species is hardwired for finding significance and sometimes the brain works overtime in reading more into things than is there. Now comes a group of psychologists at the University of Liverpool who conclude that F.B.I. profiling of criminals is little more than cold reading and subjective validation at work. This was apparent to many people about ten years ago when Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, was caught and the profile was matched to the man. The F.B.I. said the Unabomber would be in his late 30's or early 40's. Kaczynski was 53 when caught. The profile was correct in predicting a white male, though this doesn't seem like a tough trait to guess. The F.B.I. said he'd be 5'10" to 6' tall, 165 pounds, with reddish-blond hair, a thin mustache, and a ruddy complexion. Kaczynski was 5'8", weighed 143 pounds, had brown hair, pale skin, and was bearded. The profile predicted he would be a blue collar worker with a high school degree. Kaczynski hadn't had a job in 25 years and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan in addition to being a graduate of Harvard University. The FBI profile predicted the Unabomber would be a meticulously organized person, reclusive and having problems dealing with women. Kaczynski was a recluse (again, not a tough call) who apparently did not deal with women at all, but he was slovenly and unkempt. The F.B.I. profile was wrong about almost everything regarding a man they'd been tracking for years. The Liverpool psychologists argue that profiling won't work the way the F.B.I. does it. (F.B.I. profiling assumes a stable relationship between configurations of offense behaviors and background characteristics, which is not supported by the research evidence.) Second, they note that the F.B.I. claims a high degree of accuracy for the method that supposedly shouldn't work. Then, they explain the illusion of accuracy as due to subjective validation. The whole sordid story is detailed in Malcom Gladwell's recent article in the New Yorker, "Dangerous Minds - criminal profiling made easy." According to Gladwell, the psychologists tested the F.B.I.'s profile of serial sex-offender killers, who the profilers divide into two types based on their level of organization.
It also turns out that it shouldn't be surprising that the profile is bogus. It wasn't based on a representative sample. According to Gladwell, the F.B.I. profilers who came up with the serial killer profile, John Douglas and Robert Ressler, chatted only with convicts who were in prison in California. Furthermore, they had no standardized protocol for interviewing their subjects. There are other reasons F.B.I. profiles are bound to be inaccurate. I noted some of these in a newsletter five years ago. Even if the profilers got a representative sample of, say, serial rapists, they can never interview the ones they don't catch nor the one's they catch but don't convict. Also, it would be naive to believe that serial rapists or killers are going to be forthright and totally truthful in any interview. F.B.I. profiles are based on the assumption that there is a pattern where in fact there is none. The assumption is that facts about the crime will match up with facts about the criminal. The Liverpool psychologists tested this hypothesis:
As one vocal critic of F.B.I. profiling, Brent Turvey, put it: "The fact is that different offenders can exhibit the same behaviors for completely different reasons." Turvey supports a method of profiling known as Behavioural Evidence Analysis, which is not discussed here or in Gladwell's article. "You’ve got a rapist who attacks a woman in the park and pulls her shirt up over her face," says Turvey. "Why? What does that mean? There are ten different things it could mean. It could mean he doesn’t want to see her. It could mean he doesn’t want her to see him. It could mean he wants to see her breasts, he wants to imagine someone else, he wants to incapacitate her arms—all of those are possibilities. You can’t just look at one behavior in isolation.” Does this sound familiar? The same problem exists with the polygraph, a favorite tool of the F.B.I. and other law enforcement agencies. The polygraph measures such things as heartbeat, blood pressure, and respiration. The polygraph is not a lie detector because changes in heartbeat, blood pressure, and respiration can be caused by many things. Nervousness, anger, sadness, embarrassment, and fear can all be causal factors in altering one's heart rate, blood pressure, or respiration rate. Having to go to the bathroom can also be causative. There are also a number of medical conditions such as colds, headaches, constipation, or neurological and muscular problems that can cause the physiological changes measured by the polygraph. The claim that an expert can tell when the changes are due to a lie and when they are due to other factors has never been proven. Why do so many people, in and out of law enforcement, believe the polygraph is a lie detector? For the same reason that many believe that profiling is accurate, that their daily horoscope is right on, that their tarot card reader is clairvoyant, that John Edward gets messages from the dead, that graphology can reveal the true character of a person, and that Rush Limbaugh is a national treasure: the belief is rooted in cold reading and subjective validation, and grows in soil fertilized with a lot of confirmation bias and communal reinforcement. Laurence Alison, one of the leaders of the Liverpool group and the author of The Forensic Psychologist's Casebook: Psychological Profiling and Criminal Investigation, examined one of the F.B.I.'s prime exhibits for the validity of their profiling method, the profile of the so-called "rooftop killer." He found, according to Gladwell, that the profile was written in unverifiable, contradictory, and ambiguous language so that "it could support virtually any interpretation."
Alison "gave the details of the crime, the profile prepared by the F.B.I., and a description of the offender [who had been caught] to a group of senior police officers and forensic professionals in England." They rated the profile as highly accurate. Alison then gave another group of officers the same case materials to evaluate, except that he created an imaginary set of traits for the killer. Again, the officers rated the profile as highly accurate. Like Ray Hyman discovered years ago, it doesn't matter what you tell people; they'll validate your claims if they want you to be right. They'll ignore what doesn't fit and work hard to find meaning and significance in your reading or profile. I hope that the police community reads Gladwell's account and recognizes that it is not an accident that some of them think that people claiming to be psychic sometimes seem to be right. They'll at least get a laugh, as I did, when Gladwell reports that after Douglas told a group of detectives what traits were likely in the bad guy they were after, one of the detectives asked him if he were psychic. He wanted to know because the F.B.I. profiler was saying the same things a psychic had told them the week before. postscript If you want to learn more about cold reading, take a look at Skeptico's posting for Nov. 12. It's about tomorrow night's "Larry King Live" show that will feature two cold readers who call themselves mediums, James Van Praagh and John Edward. There is even a Bingo game card to help you see what is going on while you watch the performances—a good exercise for those new to the study of cold reading. further reading Other questionable practices of the F.B.I. |
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