Fuzzy facts

We just got around to reading "Dangerous Minds," Malcolm Gladwell’s piece in last week’s New Yorker about similarities between the FBI’s criminal profiling system and cold readings (we cover cold readings in our upcoming book, specifically on how you can use them in your life). Here, Gladwell gives a little background:

“Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic ‘The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading,’ itemizes them one by one... First is the Rainbow Ruse—the ‘statement which credits the client with both a personality trait and its opposite.’ (‘I would say that on the whole you can be rather a quiet, self effacing type, but when the circumstances are right, you can be quite the life and soul of the party if the mood strikes you.’) The Jacques Statement [which] tailors the prediction to the age of the subject. To someone in his late thirties or early forties, for example, the psychic says, ‘If you are honest about it, you often get to wondering what happened to all those dreams you had when you were younger.’ There is the Barnum Statement, the assertion so general that anyone would agree, and the Fuzzy Fact, the seemingly factual statement couched in a way that ‘leaves plenty of scope to be developed into something more specific.’ ... And that’s only the start: there is the Greener Grass technique, the Diverted Question, the Russian Doll, Sugar Lumps, not to mention Forking and the Good Chance Guess...”

And sure, there’s something amusing about watching a guy make a buck by speaking to the dead or telling fortunes. It’s a little less funny when it’s the FBI trying to find serial killer whose crimes are about as heinous as they get. Gladwell ends his piece with the Feds lending their expertise to help local authorities in the hunt for the BTK killer:

“The best minds in the F.B.I. had given the Wichita detectives a blueprint for their investigation. Look for an American male with a possible connection to the military. His I.Q. will be above 105. He will like to masturbate, and will be aloof and selfish in bed. He will drive a decent car. He will be a ‘now’ person. He won’t be comfortable with women. But he may have women friends. He will be a lone wolf. But he will be able to function in social settings. He won’t be unmemorable. But he will be unknowable. He will be either never married, divorced, or married, and if he was or is married his wife will be younger or older. He may or may not live in a rental, and might be lower class, upper lower class, lower middle class or middle class. And he will be crazy like a fox, as opposed to being mental. If you’re keeping score, that’s a Jacques Statement, two Barnum Statements, four Rainbow Ruses, a Good Chance Guess, two predictions that aren’t really predictions because they could never be verified—and nothing even close to the salient fact that BTK was a pillar of his community, the president of his church and the married father of two.”

Read up about BTK and you’ll see how unamusing this is. Needless to say, “profiling” didn’t net this guy. He offered to send the cops a disk containing some information about himself, so long as they promised there was no way to trace it back to him. The police promised they wouldn't be able to, and after they received the package, easily tracked him down. Cold reading may not have helped at all. But those cops got him, alright, using a classic Golden Age scam known in many parts as "lying."