Derren Brown demonstrates to people from America, to the UK, to Italy, just how a psychic reading actually works.
From Wikipedia:
Cold reading is a series of techniques used by mentalists, illusionists, and con artists to determine or express details about another person, often in order to convince them that the reader knows much more about a subject than they actually do.[1] Without prior knowledge of a person, a practiced cold reader can still quickly obtain a great deal of information about the subject 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 readers commonly employ high probability guesses about the subject, quickly picking up on signals from their subjects as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not, and then emphasizing and reinforcing any chance connections the subjects acknowledge while quickly moving on from missed guesses.
Richard Dawkins conducts a extended interview of Derren Brown. In the interview Brown discusses cold reading, charlatans, true believers, etc. Fascinating stuff. (As an aside, just look at how mild-mannered Richard Dawkins is. Where does that “angry atheist” label come from anyway?)
More information on cold reading:
How to Cold Read (12 steps)
OO, I can’t wait to have time to watch the videos — I LOVE stuff about cold reading. It’s one of the reasons I like to watch The Mentalist.
I especially love the video I’ve featured at the top of the post. Wickedly delicious!