Originally Posted by
zzenzero:
“Colin Fry? That was a while back I mentioned him. A great medium btw and Living TV must be paying an awful lot of people to make Colin look as good as he does...and they can't afford that sort of money.
proven in psychological experiments. Not to my knowledge.Nothing general in the way that I look at the stars....forget the tabloid columns on scopes..now THAT is general and for effect.And the first thing any stargazer should and usually does pass on are the negatives as well as the positives.And we DO ask others to take responsibility for the ship they steer.
By all means rubbish what you will.I just thought bollock's lacked a certain style.
Your pisces btw is progressed to aries....but that's another story.
”
I'll try not to make this too long because we're really drifting off-topic now and I should probably PM but hopefully the mods will allow me a slight indulgence.
Firstly, on Colin Fry, as someone else mentioned
he was exposed sitting on a table waving a luminous bell around when the lights were 'accidentally' turned on at a reading. Not exactly credible but perhaps he just wasn't in tune that night. As I said, I find it hard to trust UK living when they have both James Van Praagh and John Edwards on who have definitely been exposed as fakes.
As to the psychological experiment, I was referring to the Forer effect (aka Barnum effect, personal validation effect, subjective validation effect). Forer gave a personality test to his students, didn't read them and then gave each one the exact same answer as to their personality. The average rating of accuracy from the students was over 4 out of 5. This is probably because people tend to accept claims about themselves to be true because they want them to be rather than dut to any empirical evidence. They tend to accept questionable statements if they're positive enough. In addition, there's a lot of 'filling in the blanks' with vague or inconsistent claims in order to make sense out of the claims. People who seek counseling from psychics, mediums, fortune tellers, mind readers, graphologists, etc., will often ignore false or questionable claims and, in many cases, by their own words or actions, will provide most of the information they erroneously attribute to a pseudoscientific counselor. Many such subjects often feel their counselors have provided them with profound and personal information. Such subjective validation, however, is of little scientific value.
(Paraphrased from Forer's study).
To test the self-deception part, you would need to do a large number of readings on a great many people, do their personality tests but then not tell them which one was theirs. Each subject would have to pick the one that referred to them. So far, in such tests, no occult or pseudoscientific method has ever passed.
By the way, I have had my entire star chart done - a proper sceptic has to treat his opposition fairly after all
On the last point, of the negatives and personal responsibility, I apologise, that was a bit abrupt and harsh of me. I am sure you do not really try to abrogate personal choice and responsibility.
'Bollocks' was to have a go at me as much as you for my psychological leaps on Michelle's character with little evidence
Phew, ramble over now!