Seebach: It's often too easy to exploit our willingness to believe

Saturday, June 17, 2006

Michael Shermer, skeptic-in- chief, has a new book titled Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown, about all the ways in which people deceive themselves or allow themselves to be deceived by irrational beliefs.

"As pattern-seeking primates," he says in the introduction, "we scan the random points of light in the night sky of our lives and connect the dots to form constellations of meaning. Sometimes the patterns are real, sometimes not."

That about sums it up, but here I'm going to focus on Shermer's career as a psychic. Note Shermer is not a psychic, and does not claim to be - in fact, he believes as I do that no one is. Nonetheless, he had the opportunity to play one on TV when Bill Nye invited him to be a guest on the show Eyes of Nye and spend a day as an astrologer, tarot card reader, palm reader and psychic medium talking to the dead.

"With almost no experience in any of these psychic modalities, I prepared myself the night before and on the plane flying to the studio, then improvised live- to-tape in studio, managing to completely convince my sitters that I had genuine psychic powers, reducing several subjects to tears when we 'connected' to lost loved ones. It was at this point that I realized the emotional impact that psychics can have on believers, and the immorality of the entire process and industry that has built up around these claims."

My son Peter years ago worked up a tarot-card-reading display for something to amuse people at parties, but he hastily quit when he found out that people were asking him for readings in all seriousness. He worried that some of them might actually take his ad-libbed advice.

But people are eager to believe, and easy to fool. I asked Shermer, by e-mail, about what happens when people find out they've been taken in. "My experience with disclosing to subjects that I've been pretending to be psychic is not at all positive. No one has ever said 'Oh, wow, I never realized how easy it is to fake being a psychic, I guess this means I should rethink my beliefs about ESP.' Instead what I always get is anger and resentment that I've tried to take something away, that I'm evil for being a spoiler of a cherished belief, and that it is none of my business," he answered.

"For a television show I did for Unsolved Mysteries, in which I received a psychic reading from James Van Praagh, along with a dozen other people in an all-day shoot at a home in Pasadena, at the end of the day we disclosed to everyone that I was a plant in the group and that Van Praagh's reading was completely wrong, and then I explained to the group how he got all the information he did on them. Instead of thanking me for disclosing a fraud, instead of being furious at Van Praagh for deceiving them during their time of loss and grief, they were mad at me!

For Nye's show, Shermer did "cold readings" on five women - that is, he had no prior information about them, except their birth dates, as used to prepare an astrological chart. His how-to book was The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading, by Ian Rowland. He was introduced to the subjects in the studio as "Michael from Hollywood" and he told them that he was a "psychic intuitor," adding that everyone has the gift but he had improved his gift with practice.

The subjects were told, after their sessions, that Shermer was a psychologist trying to demonstrate how those claiming to be psychic accomplish what they do, so they knew then it wasn't "real."

Shermer reprints the opening statement he used with all of them - all of them, please note - that ended with the sentence, "You are wise in the ways of the world, a wisdom gained through hard experience rather than book learning." Every one of the subjects "nodded furiously in agreement, emphasizing that this statement summed them up to a T."

One of his subjects was a woman of 50 whose father had died suddenly when she was in her 20s, and it was clear to Shermer that she had unresolved issues about his death. He told her - as he thought he ethically could - that her father would want her to remember him, but it was time to move on. And then he added, for a somewhat lighter touch, "And it's OK to throw away all those boxes of his stuff that you have been keeping but want to get rid of."

Bingo! She had a garage full.

In the post-reading interview she said she had been going to psychics for 10 years, trying to resolve her issues, "and that mine was the single best reading she had ever had."

If you believe in any of these things - especially if you spend money on them - you're being gulled.

Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the News. She can be reached by telephone at (303) 892-2519 or by e-mail at seebach@RockyMountainNews.com.