Psychics and Mediums

My Positions

1. No psychic or medium has ever demonstrated their ability under controlled conditions. I do not hold that any such ability exists.
2. The performances are fully explained by cold reading, hot reading, and the willingness of the sitter to help.
3. Charging the bereaved for conversations with their dead is fraud whether or not the practitioner believes in it, and I would regulate it as such.

Notes

1. How it is done. A reading consists of statements that are true of almost everyone (Forer Effect), rapid-fire guesses that the sitter completes ("I'm getting a J, John, James, a father figure?"), the quiet dropping of misses and the loud repetition of hits, and the sitter's own memory, which afterwards retains the hits (Confirmation Bias). This is cold reading, and it can be taught in an afternoon. Hot reading is simpler still: research the audience beforehand, read the cards they filled in at the door, or have an assistant chat to them in the queue. Derren Brown reproduces the whole repertoire on stage while telling the audience that it is a trick, and it works just as well.
2. The record under test. James Randi's Million Dollar Challenge ran from 1964 to 2015, with over a thousand applicants; none passed even the preliminary test, and most of the famous names declined to apply. A 2005 study by Wiseman and O'Keeffe gave professional mediums sittings in which the sitter could not be seen or heard; their readings were no better than chance. The most prominent television psychic of the 2000s told the parents of a missing boy on air that he was dead; he was found alive four years later.
3. Where it came from. Modern spiritualism began in 1848 with the Fox sisters' "rappings", which Margaret Fox publicly confessed in 1888 to have produced by cracking her toe joints. The movement survived the confession unharmed, which tells you that the demand is independent of the evidence. Harry Houdini spent the 1920s exposing mediums one by one and was not thanked for it.
4. There is no mechanism and no need for one. A reliable channel to the dead would be the most important discovery in the history of the species. It would also be trivially easy to demonstrate: ask the deceased something the sitter does not know and can later check. This never happens. The dead, it turns out, only ever say things that the living already know, in the vague and reassuring register of someone guessing.
5. The harm is specific. Money taken from the grieving, police time spent on "tips", families of the missing given false hope or false grief. The mildest honest description of the trade is that it sells a comforting performance to people who are not in a position to judge it. Spiritualism also ran in my own family, as noted under Atheism, which is one reason the subject does not feel academic to me.
6. The general case is the same as for Ghosts: anecdote only, a century of organised failure to find anything, and natural explanations that account for every reported feature. Hitchens' Razor disposes of the rest.

Sources

• Hyman, R., "Cold Reading: How to Convince Strangers That You Know All About Them", The Zetetic 1(2) (1977)
• O'Keeffe, C. and Wiseman, R., "Testing alleged mediumship: Methods and results", British Journal of Psychology 96 (2005)
• Houdini, H., A Magician Among the Spirits (1924)
• Margaret Fox's confession, New York World, 21 October 1888
• The Shawn Hornbeck case, 2003 prediction and 2007 recovery, reported by CNN and the Associated Press
• James Randi Educational Foundation, One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, 1964–2015

Also see

• Ghosts
• Life After Death
• Cold reading
• Forer Effect
• Astrology and Tarot
• Derren Brown
• James Randi