Cold Reading

Cold reading is a technique often used by mentalists, fortune tellers, psychics, and mediums to determine details about another person in order to convince them that the reader knows much more about a subject than he or she actually does.

Even without prior knowledge of a person, a practiced cold reader can still quickly obtain a great deal of information about the subject by carefully analyzing the person's body language, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. - check out some of Derren Brown's stuff on YouTube or Google video for a better idea of how this can be used in such completely unfamiliar settings or circumstances [especially the clip when he's in the club/lounge with 3 girls and exposes their inner thoughts or something].

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.

Cold reading can also be used, much more importantly in my mind, to set and develop frames for people to fit into. This is a very beneficial use of cold reading. I have a few examples of this in some emails and texts that I've been sending out [check out my Some Text Messages and Mass Text Message posts from before], and I'll probably post some of those soon, to provide a better idea of this.

Also, I'll be posting some general as well as specific cold reading routines soon, so check back for them in the next few days :-)

~h