I’ve heard people get their fortunes told correctly and I never believed it, until my mother had her fortune told and they gave her an uncanny amount of info about me that eventually came true.
Obviously I don’t believe in this. There must be some tricks behind it all to at least get one or two things correct. How does it work?
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Broad enough statements can easily be pattern-matched to truth, and with enough guesses, you’ll eventually land on one. You might start with the practice of [cold reading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading) as a baseline.
There are a few tricks that fortune tellers and psychics use.
1. if you’re vague enough in your prediction, then it can apply to anything. So don’t say “you’re going to get in a car crash tomorrow”. Say “I see troubles in your near future”, so if literally anything goes wrong in a undefined period of time, the prediction came true.
2. you can use what you know about a person to make more specific guesses. If they have young kids, you can maybe say that one do the kids will break something, because that’s bound to happen.
3. if you throw out a lot of different predictions, people have a tendency to remember the ones that came true more than the ones that didn’t. So if you’re friends had an eerily specific prediction came true, they could just be forgetting about all the other predictions the psychic made that didn’t come true.
A friend of mine does tarot readings. Everything she says is vague and she also adds that the reading could refer to past, current or future things. Extra easy to invoque confirmation bias.
Lots of good answers here, so far, and all hit on great points. There’s one more I’d like to make: life is made of many, many very similar stories. A lot of these stories, most people can be expected to go through or have already gone through. One trick is just hitting on the right one. Male, aged 29 and below? “Guess” a bitter break up and/or searching for that perfect partner. Hell, you can even take the “male” out of that one, come to think. Smiling? “Guess” that have good humor, and are probably there asking their question at the behest of a friend. Permanent frown lines or early-life wrinkles? Hard life. There is just so much that you can see in people just from their appearance, before they even open their mouths that it’s quite honestly astonishing. And those are considered ‘cold’ reads. It gets even more insane with warm reads or hot reads (a reader should be so lucky! Lol)
I’m betting your mother didn’t tell you all the wild, random guesses this fortune teller made.
My brother got really into this crap for a while, to the point he tried to convince me that I was actually a girl because a psychic had told him that he has a sister. The only truth in the whole thing is that she took a lot of his money.
they dont.
a few years ago i saw a comedian attempt to show up fortune tellers. so he agreed to be a fortune teller for a day. he told everyone fortunes, with 100% accuracy. they were all astounded and asked him how he could predict their futures so accuratly.
his answer. its simply all a trick of words. the way he said what he said meant, that whatever happened in their lives, he was always right.
On event style fortune readings, like on TV, guests are asked to fill out questionnaires about their life and what they hope to get out of the event.
They are usually presented innocuously to appear like they are just collecting demographic data.
Staffers then pore over the data and feed information to the ‘reader’ via ear pieces or teleprompter data. Sometimes they even collect public data about the person in question from census records using data they collected.
Finally, for taped events the editors do their thing to make all the misses disappear and amplify the hits.
The so-called Forer Effect is at play here. Basically, the fortunes are so generally applicable that the customer will likely see them as fitting at some point. Humans have a tendency to seek patterns, and if they already “expect” events to fall in line with their fortunes, they will seek out those patterns and confirm them.
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