Cold reading is a series of techniques used by mentalists, psychics, fortune-tellers, mediums and illusionists to determine or express details about another person, often in order to convince them that the reader knows much more about a subject than they actually do. Without prior knowledge of a person, a practiced cold reader can still quickly obtain a great deal of information about the subject by analyzing the person's body language, age, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. Cold readers commonly employ high probability guesses about the subject, quickly picking up on signals from their subjects as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not, and then emphasizing and reinforcing any chance connections the subjects acknowledge while quickly moving on from missed guesses.
Read more about Cold Reading: Basic Procedure, Other Techniques, Contrasting Claims of Performers, Subconscious Cold Reading, In Movies and On Television
Famous quotes containing the words cold and/or reading:
“My salad days,
When I was green in judgment, cold in blood,
To say as I said then!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that to be found in reading a story.”
—Stendhal [Marie Henri Beyle] (1783–1842)