Cold Reading

If there is one thing I despise in the world, it is those who make a living from the false comfort of someone who has lost a loved one, when the comfort comes from telling them "Hey! They're dead, but they want me to tell you X." Nor surprisingly, many people share my thoughts. Of the bunch, Penn & Teller and South Park pop out.

In cold reading, the reader starts out by asking a very, very vague question. Something like "I'm sensing a... J." And of every single person in the crowd, it's likely that someone they are there about has a first, last, or middle name starting with J (Or even named "Jay". Or they liked Blue Jays, or liked the baseball team.) Then depending on what name the person gives, and in what way, the reader will make assumptions about them being alive or dead, man or woman, parent or something else. Then after the long chain of events, when the reader finally gets to the point, they'll give some all-around advice or something in the same way horoscopes predict what kind of day you'll have. Some common ones are "Don't worry about the money", "Don't break the family up over me", "You should stay on the course you're going", "Don't feel guilty", and even more if there's more context to be had.

In Penn & Teller's TV series, they cover many topics that are pseudoscience, yet are popular. One of their earlier episodes was over cold reading, and with a low budget and a reputation for being skeptics, they never got to do anything with John Edwards, but they had their time with a reader low on the chain. She targets a young man in the front who is crying, and starts to repeatedly ask the wrong questions and give the wrong leads, and it starts showing that she's starting to do poorly. This is about where the clip cuts out.

South Park did quite well on this subject in my opinion. As with a lot of pseudoscience topics, they make fun of the pseudoscience and give the message that the real science isn't stupid. In this case, Stan went out and started cold reading, telling people how he did it each step of the way, and when he told people that he's doing a trick, they tell him he's gifted. It eventually leads up to a faceoff between John Edwards and Stan, where Edwards is abducted and named "Biggest Douche in the Universe".