Pseudoscience Experiment for Kids: Testing Psychic Predictions

It’s that time of year again. That special time of year when we stop, reflect on the past, consider the future, and… call a psychic.

Ok so that last part is a joke but it isn’t as far off as you might think. Polls in the US consistently find that roughly one quarter of adults believe that psychics are real (although some put that number as high as 4 out of 10), and one in five in the US have paid a psychic for… whatever it is that psychics do. So while psychics aren’t even on the radar for most people, they are much more popular than you might think. Not only that, they are a big business, with over two billion dollars a year going to psychics in the US alone.

To put those numbers in perspective, on average over the past decade more people paid for the services of a psychic than paid for the services of a licensed therapist. This might seem like an arbitrary comparison until you realize that magazines like Elle (which has 33 million subscribers globally and over 100 million unique online visitors a month) appear to advocate going to psychics instead of seeing an actual mental health provider. To their credit they do give the caveat that this should only be done as long as it is an “ethical” psychic. But what exactly is an ethical psychic? One who tells people to go to a licensed therapist instead of a psychic? For more on Elle‘s scandalous article check out Daniel Reed’s take on it in the Skeptical Inquirer.

So in the spirit of raising little critical thinkers who are inoculated against psychic shilling, here is a fun three-step activity you can do with your kid to introduce them to the wacky world of psychics . All you will need is a computer and access to the internet.

Step one: go online and search for psychic predictions for the coming year.

Side note: You will immediately notice that the links that pop up are from terrible sources. If your kid is old enough, that might be a good opportunity to talk about the importance or sources when getting information. What makes these sources bad? How can we tell them apart from good sources?

Side-side note: Most predictions for the coming year are vague, filled with new-agey psycho-babble, and could easily apply to just about anyone. Predictions that sound like advice are the most common. Things like “trust your heart when that tough moment comes,” “focus on relationships this Spring,” and “you’re in danger of forgetting yourself this year.” This is done one purpose! Time to introduce the Barnum Effect to your kid (there are a couple of scenes in Book 1 of my Beyond Belief series that describe the Barnum Effect and how it works). And if they know about the Barnum Effect already, see if they can spot it in these predictions.

For a fun activity while you are searching online, see if your kid can come up with a couple Barnum predictions of their own.

Although most of the predictions are Barnum-style, try to find a clear testable prediction. They are easy to find if you search for them. For example, in a quick Google search I found psychics who predicted an increase in solar storms in the coming year, predicted an upcoming alien encounter, and a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. Once you have found a psychic who makes clear testable predictions it is time for the final step in the pseudoscience experiment…

Step three: check what they predicted last year and see how they did!

Kids love this online sleuthing part of the pseudoscience experiment. I encourage you to hand over the keyboard at this point and have them guide the investigation. Remember that psychic who predicted more solar storms? Last year she predicted that robots would become commonplace and that something “really big lurking at the bottom of the ocean” would be caught on camera. And that psychic who predicted an alien encounter for the coming year? She predicted that humans would achieve immortality in 2023 but that they would also have to contend with a nuclear disaster that impacts the whole planet. Oops. In fact, many of these psychics have years and years of old predictions that are still online and viewable to a curious kid who searches for them. These psychics are simply counting on the fact that most people will never be curious enough to do that.

Most psychics love to tout the predictions that came true, but what they fail to mention is the mountain of predictions they made that did not come true. By loudly focusing on the hits and ignoring the misses they give the impression that they are 100% accurate. This is such a common ruse that the mathematician John Allen Paulos coined the term “Jean Dixon Effect” to describe it, naming it after an infamous psychic who made millions using it. Psychics attempt to take all those failed predictions and toss them down the memory hole, but luckily you and your kid now have a time machine at your fingertips. You can simply search for last year’s predictions and see what they made. This is a fun pseudoscience experiment that takes just minutes and is easy to do. And by doing it with your kid you give them to tools to quickly test things they read online. Try it this year with your little skeptic.