Ethics

Baloney Psychic Detectives

By Adam Kolber

Every once in a while, purely by chance, a psychic is going to get it right.   Those are the cases we're likely to hear about.  Here's a relatively rare article where the story is about failures.  From the conclusion:

All the information that all 30 psychics gave was wrong. The numbers, the dreams and visions, the river, the white churches?every detail was not only completely wrong but wasted time and resources. Police spent about 40 work hours sorting through the information.

The psychics are largely to blame, but journalists bear some responsibility. If more journalists covering missing persons cases followed up on their reporting and publicized psychics' consistent failures, perhaps fewer would contact police with their visions and hunches, wasting police time and falsely raising the hopes of the missing person's family.

For more sources on the subject, see this post at the Law and Magic Blog.

Full post as published by Neuroethics and Law on May 27, 2009 (boomark / email).