History

The palm reader who talked himself out of it

We sell palm readings. We are also going to hand you the single best argument against them, because you will find it anyway and you should hear it from us.

Ray Hyman, born in 1928, put himself through his early years partly by reading palms. He was good at it. Clients told him he was good at it. He believed in it — not as a party trick but as a real skill he was developing, and the feedback he was getting was overwhelming and constant.

The experiment

A mentalist named Stanley Jaks made him a suggestion. Try giving readings that say the opposite of what the lines indicate. Keep the manner, keep the confidence, keep the structure — just invert the content.

Hyman tried it. The clients agreed just as readily. They found the inverted readings just as accurate, just as moving, just as specific to them. Nothing in the response distinguished a reading built on the lines from a reading built on their negation.

Hyman became a psychologist, spent his career at the University of Oregon, and was a founding member of the committee that became the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. In 1977 he published Cold Reading: How to Convince Strangers That You Know All About Them, which remains the clearest description of the mechanism in print.

What is actually going on

Hyman’s account, and the research around it, points at a handful of ordinary human tendencies rather than anything exotic:

• The Barnum effect. Statements vague enough to fit most people are experienced as precisely personal. "You have a side you do not show many people" is true of everyone and feels like a revelation.
• Selective memory. The hits are remembered and the misses are quietly discarded, by the client, without any dishonesty on anyone’s part.
• Active participation. The client supplies the specifics. A reader says "there has been a disruption around work" and the client fills in the redundancy, the resignation, the row with a manager — and then credits the reader with it.
• The stakes. Someone who has paid and sat down wants the reading to work. That wanting is not a weakness; it is what makes reflective writing useful. It is also what makes it impossible to evaluate from the inside.

So why are we still here

Because a reading can be worth having without being predictive, and we would rather say that out loud than run a business on a claim we cannot support.

What we sell is a specific, structured, carefully written piece of prose about a photograph you took of your own hand, pointed at a question you chose, in a tradition with four centuries of vocabulary behind it. Read it as an unusually good prompt for thinking about yourself and it will earn its price. Read it as a forecast and you have been had — by the genre, not by us, but had all the same.

Every reading we produce says which of its claims come from your hand and which come from what you told us about yourself. Hyman’s point is exactly why we do that. If a reading will feel accurate regardless, the only honest thing left is to show your working.