Cold reading – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia »
Cold reading is a set of techniques used by mentalists, psychics, fortune-tellers, mediums and illusionists
to determine or express details about another person, often to imply
that the reader knows much more about the person than the reader
actually does.[1] Without prior knowledge, a practiced cold-reader can quickly obtain a great deal of information by analyzing the person’s body language, age, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech,
place of origin, etc. Cold readings commonly employ high-probability
guesses, quickly picking up on signals as to whether their guesses are
in the right direction or not, then emphasizing and reinforcing chance
connections and quickly moving on from missed guesses.