Cold reading isn't a dirty trick in itself. It is a useful tool in most relationships in a lifetime.
But like anything else there are those that will abuse it. I have to agree that unless the person doing it makes a promise that endangers your health or finances drastically there is no crime in a legal sense.
Most times the mark chose to visit the reader so the act is voluntary. All the way to the bank for one of them.
Money is powerful motivation and if I could make a decent living just talking, hell yeah. It beats fixing broken cars.
Except Henry and Edwards are not doing cold readings, which is easy enough to see if you just compare their results against someone like Derren Brown, who fakes it as part of his show. He picks an unsophisticated, young unaccomplished audience, and spends 2.5 minutes per person on his reading, getting nothing right with detail. To some extent you have to be gullible just to accept what he's trying to show. He didn't run his ad to solicit at MIT or Wall Street. There is a reason for that.
Here is a NY Times author's transcript of the John Edwards readings he observed. I've got pages and pages of this stuff, this is a sample with more to follow. See if you can explain the following exchanges by cold reading.
Note that Edward isn’t eliciting information from the audience members in these instances like Derren Brown. He’s presenting specific information that is verified only after he says it.
* * *
Edward: Did someone here study with Bob Ross, the TV artist? ... I’m getting Bob Ross. I’m also seeing a picture of a tree, shrunken down. It was big, now it’s small.
Man: My mom took lessons from Bob Ross. One of her paintings was of a tree. It was too big for the album, so I had it reduced.
Edward: Someone in your family went to a farm and drank milk straight from the cow?
Man: That was me. When I was a kid.
Edward: When they marked her skin for the IV, she said it was the closest she’d ever get to having a tattoo?
Man: That’s what she said, exactly.
Edward: And you had to be sort of the “air traffic control” for her passing?
Man: The doc told us that I would be her air traffic controller. That’s the phrase he used.
Edward: Somebody dressed up as a tree?
Man: My dad dressed up as a Christmas tree.
Edward: They’re laughing, sort of teasing you about your leg, your knee.
Woman: I took a hayride, and I fell and twisted my knee a couple of months ago.
Edward: Was there a baby’s toy buried with him [an elderly man]?
Woman: A stuffed bunny. My daughter’s.
Edward: I’m getting the name Maynard.
Man: That’s my girlfriend’s last name. I don’t know how you got that. It’s an unusual name.
