People turn to crystal balls and tarot cards not for hard answers but for a story that gives them a feeling of control over their lives. Phony psychics and stage magicians use a system called “cold reading” that leverages the Barnum effect and base rates to make it seem like they can read minds and predict the future. And our minds conspire to make the stories they tell us seem true. The mentalist Stanley Jaks demonstrated this by reading people’s fortunes and telling them the opposite of what standard palm reading would have said. The result? Didn’t matter. People believed it just as much.
