The Onesimus Programme

Part One
The Tricks Many People who Claim to be Psychic Use

Introduction - Why People Need to Know About False Claims of Psychic Ability and Other Supernatural Power

It seems most people believe psychic power exists. It can seem exciting and fun to visit psychics or for a person to test their own psychic ability. And people can believe they'll receive comfort and care and words of wisdom when they go to see a psychic, hoping they'll be able to speak with a relative who died or be able to get some insight into their future so they can prepare for what's coming. They may well get compassion and words of wisdom, but if they do, the wisdom is likely to come from the person's natural store of it, not from somewhere mysterious or supernatural.
It's impossible to know for sure that supernatural help won't be on offer; but people need to be wary, because unfortunately, many people have been conned or frightened by people who claim to be psychic, because, for instance, they have scared them by telling them they can sense that a curse has been put on them, only to ask for more and more money to remove it till they're causing the person financial problems, or they have told them things that caused them to be frightened all their lives, such as that they'll die fairly young. Those people can be full of regrets over blighted years if they live longer than they thought they would.
Reputable psychics will not do things like that to people. But there are lots of other things they do that lead to people coming away impressed with the accuracy of what they believe to be the supernatural power of the psychic, when in reality it wasn't any such thing but a clever technique that almost anyone could do if they learned it, by perfectly natural means. And people's lives can still be influenced, not always for the better. For instance, there are psychic hotlines where people with serious problems phone up and spend a lot of money talking to someone, hoping to get advice that's of a higher quality than they could get elsewhere because it has supernatural insight. But they can come away with no better advice than they could have got from a friend, and it might possibly be advice to do something that really isn't a good idea, which they're more likely to take because they believe it was given with supernatural authority.
It's because people claiming to have psychic ability can have such undue influence over people's lives that people need to understand what tricks or techniques they can use to gain people's confidence. The more they know about them, the less likely they will be to fall for them.

Bogus Insights Into Personality That Can Fool People Into Believing the One Giving Them Must Have Special Insight or Power

One reason people can easily be fooled by psychics is because they can say things that sound very specific and accurate about an individual's personality, while in reality they're things that are common to most people. Tests have been done where each person in a large group of people has been given a personality profile, supposedly of themselves, and asked to rate how accurate it is. A high percentage of people have rated it accurately and been impressed with the insight or psychic knowledge of the person describing them, when in reality everyone was given the same personality profile, not designed for them at all but something that's always used on tests like that. It was first used by a psychologist called Bertram Forer. The tendency for people to think it must have been specially written for them and to be impressed is now called the Forer effect or the Barnum effect. The personality profile says:

You have a strong need for other people to like you and for them to admire you. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. You have a great deal of unused energy which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself on being an independent thinker and do not accept other opinions without satisfactory proof. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.

People tend to think the statement gives deep insight into their personality, but in reality, most people have those personality traits to some extent. Besides, there are enough claims making up the description that some are almost bound to be true.

How Psychics Can Sound Very Accurate So People Can Think They're Getting Information Via Psychic Power When They're Not

One reason is that people claiming to be psychic will often have memorised a set of psychic readings that sound as if they were designed for an individual but in reality they're true of lots of people. They'll recite different ones according to what kind of person they're talking to; for instance, a wealthy old man will get one that's quite different from one a teenage girl still working out what to do with her life would get. And they'll modify the readings according to what they find out about each individual. So they can sound accurate, and a customer visiting a psychic can put that down to the psychic ability of the person they're visiting.

Another reason people can be impressed with psychic readings is that people tend to forget things that were said but which weren't all that relevant to them, and give the psychic the benefit of the doubt when they say something inaccurate, assuming that since communication methods between one world and another probably aren't perfect, information can't be expected to be accurate all the time. But at the same time they'll often believe it is accurate when something worrying comes up, such as if a psychic says they have a curse on them and they need to pay money to have it removed.

If a psychic says something that either sounds accurate or worrying, it'll stand out more in the memory, so a person can forget that the psychic only got one thing right in all the 200 things they said. If it surprises them because it seems so accurate, the person can still go away thinking they've seen a psychic who has accurate insights into their personality or makes accurate predictions or knows things they couldn't know any other way.

The psychic might not even have been accurate at all without a number of clues from the person visiting them. That's because if a psychic says something that sounds a little bit relevant, such as saying they're picking up a communication from someone in the spirit world whose name is John, or perhaps someone whose name has the same first letter, people will excitedly or helpfully try to help the psychic along. They might do it by saying there's a James, for example. Then the psychic will refer to the person as James from then on, and the person who helped them along might forget they did it, misremembering that the psychic got in touch with their relative James.

Also, the psychic might suspect he was the father of the person visiting them. But to avoid getting it wrong, they might ask that in more of a questioning tone. The person helping them along might think it was close and tell them he was their uncle. So the psychic has got accurate information from making a few guesses that they didn't pick up on their own. But if they refer to the spirit they're supposedly in contact with as the person's uncle James from then on, the person might forget they gave the psychic a few hints along the way, and misremember that the psychic accurately guessed they'd had an uncle James who died. That's especially if they want to believe it's true because the thought of their uncle James being still around and allright comforts them. They won't think about what happened as critically as they would if they were told something by someone they didn't want to believe in.

Accounts told by people who've visited psychics of how impressively accurate the psychic was shouldn't be taken at face value, no matter how sincere the person talking about them is, for these very reasons and more; they might simply not realise how they were taken in, and the psychic might have seemed so nice they can't believe the psychic would defraud them.

Also, they might, for instance, come to be convinced the psychic told them very specific details about their future, when what really happened was that the psychic said something that was actually fairly vague, but the person looked for meaning in it for some time afterwards, found something it applied to, became convinced the psychic was talking about that, and from then on, misremembers the psychic as having remarkably predicted that that very thing would happen. Sometimes, a psychic will actually tell them that what they say might seem a bit vague but it's up to the client to work out in the coming days or months how it fits into their lives. They can also say that their gift doesn't work that well and whether it does can depend on how receptive the client is; so if they fail, the implication is that the psychic isn't the one to blame; the client just wasn't focusing hard enough; it's not that the psychic's a fraud.

Often though, the psychic won't be trying to defraud a client; they will be picking up cues from their body language, descriptions of their circumstances and so on, and guessing things by intuition that they assume to be coming to them from a psychic gift. When they analyse what they've been doing, they can be as unhappy and embarrassed as anyone else when they realise they're not actually that accurate, they got a lot of their information from their client's clues, and they took credit for revealing things the client actually told them, - perhaps because they were so pleased they said something accurate and believed in their gift so much they forgot they weren't the one who first mentioned it.

Also, sometimes a "psychic" can say something remarkably accurate just by chance. It can seem really impressive, looking back, but if the person who heard it listened to the whole meeting over again, they might realise it was one accurate thing out of a lot of things that were said that were vague or inaccurate, that they forgot soon afterwards because they didn't seem important so the brain didn't store them.
By Diana Holbourn