Ray Hyman – Cold Reading

This is chapter ” Cold Reading: How to Convince Strangers You Know All About Them by Ray Hyman” From “The Outer Edge, Classic Investigations of the Paranormal”. This groundbreaking chapter on cold reading lists a number of tips which form part of the cold reading technique. Aside from those mentioned above, they include ‘dramatise the reading’, ‘show confidence’, ‘use gimmicks’, and also the use of ‘staging’ and a questioning technique known as ‘fishing’.

The Outer Edge is a compilation of some of the best and most memorable articles Skeptical Inquirer has published over the last two decades. Grouped into chapters on celestial portents, extraterrestrials, fortunetelling, visions of death and investigating paranormal claims, selections include:

* Cold Reading: How to Convince Strangers You Know All About Them by Ray Hyman

* An Investigation of Firewalking by Bernard Leikend and William J. McCarthy

* Incredible Cremations: Investigating Spontaneous Combustion Deaths by Joe Nickell and John F. Fischer

* The Burden of Skepticism by Carl Sagan

* New Evidence of MJ-12 Hoax by Phil Klass

* The Aliens Among Us: Hypnotic Regression Revisited by Robert Bake