Quote:
Originally Posted by Open Mind  Alex said 'call up' ....I assumed he means telephone call. If so, none of your criticism really applies. The only sensory clue would be tone of voice. |
If you read my post, you'll see that my only point about sensory clue is the first one. The second one, knowledge about what would seem specific to a lot of people, but in reality is not specific at all, is still completely valid.
And the voice can of course give away informations too (your a man or a woman, if your young or old, if you have confidence in your voice, the fact that you don't want to answer by yes or no means you are in some way skeptical of the claim, and so on). If your voice is not like the voice of a robot, each time you will say "yes" or "no" you will give away, by the tone of your voice, if he's going the right direction or not (and that's assuming you can avoid making other noice like "hum-hum" in approbation of a hint for exemple).
And when you answer "no" to a question like "I see a ring. Do you have a special ring?", he knows that he has to reinterpret the miss like "Maybe it's not a ring, maybe it's another piece of jewellery. A necklace?" (well, anyway, woman has jewellery, and every man has a watch, so that's no surprise either...), or he could say "Maybe it's not your ring. Did you're mother had a special ring?", and so on. So yes and no DO give a lot of informations...
But anyway, ok, I missed the idea that this was on the phone only. Of course there is still the problem of the evaluation of what is consider a hit or a miss. He says:
Quote:
|
When you’re done, listen to the recording and rate the accuracy of each answer, or have a friend/spouse independently rate it.
|
The main argument here is that most of the people evaluate like a hit something that is not really a hint.
It's what we call
"fallacy of personal validation". The Forer effect works on the phone as well.
Forer effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Of course having his wife helping is a nice idea, and a cute one, but still it doesn't help the fact that they will find hit where in fact there is none.
With the Forer effect and other psychological aspect of human beings, psychics can even work on the internet (chatroom, and so on). The only thing is: there "hits" are not really convincing for those of us who don't have a belief in the paranormal.
Maybe he will pretend that the psychic could say real specific stuff, like the name of the company he works with, or the number on his identitiy card. But if this medium can do that (and he's really not doing any "hot reading"), well this medium should apply right away for the Million Dollar Challenge.