A Palm Reader Who Became a Methodologist

Hyman has told the story of his own conversion often enough that it functions as the key to his method. As a student he read palms for money, believing it to be nonsense, and found that his clients told him he was remarkably accurate. On the advice of a mentor he tried an experiment: he read charts backwards, giving each client the opposite of what the system prescribed, and the clients told him he was more accurate than before.

What that taught him was not that people are gullible but something more specific and more useful, that a sitter actively co-operates in constructing a hit, supplying context, forgetting misses and remembering the one detail that landed. He carried the lesson into academic psychology at the University of Oregon and into a career spent examining not whether paranormal claims are true but why the evidence for them looks the way it does. This is why his criticism has traction inside parapsychology when louder criticism has none. He does not usually argue that a result is fabricated. He argues that a stated procedure permitted an ordinary explanation the investigators had not ruled out, which is a claim the investigators can test. He has also written on the psychology of the cold reading itself, the set of conversational techniques by which a reader elicits from a sitter the material the sitter then experiences as having been supplied, and that analysis has been taken up well outside parapsychology, in work on interviewing and on witness testimony.