Psyched Out

Here you are with the next sample article I came up with:

This week I’m starting off with a puzzle for you. You’re presented with four cards, showing A, D, 4, and 7. Each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other. Which card(s) must you turn over in order to determine whether the following statement is false? “If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side.”

Got your answer? Well, statistically, 80-90% of you are going to be wrong. [Okay, now that this is on my blog, I predict that 80-90% of my regular readers will be right.] Most people will say A and 4, but the correct answer is actually A and 7. Think about it: When is the statement false? Only when a card has a vowel on one side and an odd number on the other. So, to determine whether it’s false, we have to test all cases where it might be, which is just the A and 7. Most people don’t think this way naturally, however. It’s human nature to look for cases that would confirm a given statement, rather than statements which would falsify it. This is known as the Confirmation Bias, and it’s one of the most pervasive flaws in critical thinking.

You see this bias taking hold all over the place, but I’m going to focus on just one case now: the psychic. The success of a psychic hinges almost completely on exploiting the confirmation bias. The typical psychic will make numerous “predictions” throughout his or her career. Most of these will be quite vague, allowing the audience to shoehorn them into events on their own. Once the prediction has been shoehorned to match some specific event, it counts as a “hit” for the psychic. If the prediction can’t easily be shoehorned into anything, it’s forgotten. So the predictions become a series of hits with no memorable misses.

When reading people, the same tactic of vague guesses can often be applied successfully, but this isn’t the sole tool at the psychic’s disposal. Most stage psychics, such as the infamous Sylvia Brown, use a technique known as “cold reading,” which relies on the subject’s inclination to try to sort out vague statements and find more meaning in them than there actually is. A statement that gets no reaction is slowly modified until it does garner a reaction, and as soon as the subject responds positively, the psychic immediately reinforces what the subject has said as if it were the original prediction.

For instance, the psychic may start out by saying s/he’s sensing something about December. If the subject or someone close to them was born in December, they’ll say so and the psychic can immediately reinforce this by saying something like, “Yes, I see that.” If it isn’t a birthday, it could be an anniversary, or even just the holidays that sticks out in the subject’s mind. Even if none of this works out, the psychic can expand it to “…maybe a nearby month, January or November?” Success is inevitable.

Not all psychics are this benign, though. Some, such as John Edwards of Crossing Over fame, have been known to use “hot reading.” Hot reading involves actions such as Googling the names of audience members, or hidden accomplices within the audience who chat people up before the show. It’s a lot more direct and successful than cold reading, but it’s also a lot more obviously fraudulent once it’s exposed.

Now, despite all these arguments against how psychics operate, we should still be open to the possibility that telepathy could indeed exist. The best way to determine this is, of course, a scientific trial. Not surprisingly, many such trials have been performed. Some of them actually claimed to show positive results, but they’ve never held up to scrutiny. The rest showed no evidence of telepathy existing. But surely, if a famous medium such as John Edwards wished to prove himself, he could pass such a test easily, couldn’t he? Yet he (and all other famous psychics) has completely refused to be tested by anyone who wasn’t already a believer in telepathy. How surprising.