Fortune Teller's Tent
Fortunetellers, also known as psychic readers and advisors, have long sought to divine people's past and future, characterize their personality, and offer advice to those desiring it. The so-called Gypsies made something of an art of it, practicing what is known as "cold reading"— a clever method of fishing for information from the sitter so as to convince the person that the seer knows all about him or her. (See Ray Hyman, "Cold Reading: How to Convince Strangers that You Know All About Them," The Zetetic, now Skeptical Inquirer, Spring/Summer 1977, pp. 18-37.)
This early 1900s photo shows a fortuneteller reading a client's palm in a tent at a fair (probably in upstate New York). Her scarf-covered head suggests that she was, or feigned to be, a Gypsy. (The term applies to a wandering people once thought to have come from Egypt— hence the corruption "Gypsies." Actually, they originated in northwest India and in the fourteenth century settled in and around present-day Romania; hence they prefer to be called Romanies or Roma.
