Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [21]
It wasn’t long before my charge was nearly sobbing. This was an emotionally fragile woman of whom I could have easily taken advantage by jumping in with some inane line such as “Your father is here with us now and he wants you to know that he loves you.” But I knew I would have to look at myself in the mirror the next morning and just couldn’t do it, even for a worthwhile exposé of a very evil practice. Instead I said, “Your father would want you to keep him in your heart and your memories, but it is time now to move on.” I wanted to give her something specific, as well as lighten up the reading because it was getting pretty glum, so I said, “And it’s okay to throw away all those boxes of his stuff that you have been keeping but want to get rid of.” She burst out laughing and confessed that she had a garage full of her father’s belongings that she had long wanted to dispose of but was feeling guilty about doing so. This exchange was, I hoped, a moral message that violated no trust on my part and still had the desired effect for our show.
In the post-reading interview this subject said that she had been going to psychics for over ten years trying to resolve this business with her father, and that mine was the single best reading she had ever had. Wow! That made my psychic day.
The Disclosure
Our original plan was to tell all of the subjects after the readings that this was all just a setup to expose psychic phonies as nothing more than scam artists out to rip off people. We were not particularly worried about the college-aged subjects because, after all, if the biggest crisis in your life is trying to decide whether to major in theater arts or English lit, the veracity of a psychic’s reading is a minor wrinkle in the greater cosmic scheme. But for the last two readings we decided that they needed to be handled a little more delicately. Bill and the producers came up with this explanation: “We wanted you to know that Michael is not a psychic. He is a psychologist. We wanted to see if he could do what psychics do in terms of so-called intuitive readings. While we realize that this probably seemed real to you, it was not real for Michael in any psychic sense.”
The Grace of Scruples
I am not a psychic and I do not believe that ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, or any of the other forms of psi power has any basis whatsoever in fact. There is not a shred of evidence that any of this is real, and the fact that I could do it reasonably well with only one day of preparation shows just how vulnerable people are to these very effective nostrums. I can only imagine what I could do with more experience. Give me six hours a day of practice for a couple of months and I have no doubt that I could easily host a successful syndicated television series and increase by orders of magnitude my current bank balance—there for the grace of evolved moral sentiments and guilt-laden scruples go I. I cannot do this for one simple reason—it is wrong. I have lost both of my parents—my father suddenly of a heart attack in 1986, my mother slowly from brain cancer in 2000—and I cannot imagine anything more insulting to the dead, and more insidious to the living, than constructing a fantasy that they are hovering nearby in the psychic ether, awaiting some self-proclaimed psychic conduit to reveal to me breathtaking insights about scarred knees, broken appliances, and unfulfilled desires. This is worse than wrong. It is wanton depravity.
2
The Big “Bright” Brouhaha
An Empirical Study on an
Emerging Skeptical Movement
IN 1999 A GALLUP POLL inquired