For millennia, people have used fortune-telling. The desire to know what the future holds for us has always existed in humans. Who wouldn't want to have a little glimpse into the cosmic plan to determine whether their future holds wealth or ruin?
Animal lovers won't be happy about it, but haruspication was a common fortune-telling practice in the past that involved cutting open a recently butchered animal and pulling its intestines onto the ground to look for any symbols that could be read as a sign of future events.
Many people think that a person's name—or even the number of letters in their name—can provide vital hints about what their future holds. According to one kind of divination, the bumps on a person's head might indicate their destiny as well as their personality. Even among well-educated Americans and Europeans in the 1800s, phrenology was a phenomenally popular "science." This is not to say that it was a strange, outlandish idea.
Numerous hundreds of long-discredited (and obviously ludicrous) fortune-telling techniques exist. Numerology, tea leaf reading, tarot card reading, and palm reading are just a few of the similarly bizarre methods that are used today.
Dream interpretation
Dreams have been used as a method of fortune-telling for millennia, and there is a booming cottage industry of books, DVDs, and people who promise to predict the future by analyzing their dreams. For instance, thinking about a walnut predicts losses and financial collapse, whereas dreaming about an attic predicts the renewal of a significant friendship. (You might want to consider treatment if you frequently dream about eating walnuts in an attic with a significant other while you lose money.)
The psychology of tarot cards
The fundamental principle of fortune-telling is the same regardless of its format: looking for significance in seemingly random patterns and phenomena. People meticulously analyze the outcomes in an effort to interpret or make sense of some seemingly random event that is either witnessed in nature (animal sounds are produced, dreams are recorded, or tea leaves are stirred).
The most obvious issue is that many fortune-telling techniques invalidate one another (and themselves) by making forecasts that are inconsistent and contradictory. The same signals can be consulted more than once and still yield different results. When the same individual asks the exact same question about the future during two separate tea leaf or tarot card readings, the results should match, but they don't.
Imagine someone asking, for instance, if they'll move to Paris in ten years or if the president will be reelected for another term. No matter if you question a psychic, read tarot cards, or scatter some flower petals on the ground and seek guidance, if any of these fortune-telling techniques succeed, they should all provide the same response. Since you'll either go to Paris or not, and the president will either be reelected or not, the answers should all be the same. Instead, the outcomes are frequently no better than chance, which in many cases is a 50/50 proposition. For the same reason, a person can speak with ten psychics and receive ten different predictions about the future. Why utilize these fortune-telling techniques at all if they are so prone to error and change?
It also begs the question of why there are so many and if any of the ways were truly effective. Instead of creating literally hundreds of new fortune-telling devices, why not stay with one effective method that has been around for a while? People would naturally pick the approach that works if reading tea leaves were scientifically shown to be a more accurate technique to foretell the future than, say, staring at crystals or consulting the tarot. Instead, because they all start with the same flawed assumption—that there is meaning to be found in seemingly random phenomena—all fortune-telling techniques are equally acceptable (or wrong).
Numerous publications on fortune-telling acknowledge that the methods are unreliable; the "Note to the Reader" beginning "The Complete Book of Fortune" states, "When seeking to know your fortune by any method of divination, the results obtained must be regarded as an indication of what may happen and must not be accepted as conclusive evidence of what will happen."
Free will vs. determinism
Many individuals who believe in fortune-telling are unaware that, if they are correct, their belief has provided an answer to one of the central issues in philosophy: the conflict between free choice and determinism. The majority of individuals would prefer to think that they are in charge of their own actions and decisions in life, yet no one's ability to predict the future disproves this notion. Either there is "a future" to know (or at least glimpse), making our future predetermined, or there is no such thing as "a future" and it is unpredictable. Logically, if the future is known, you can't control your own fate.
It's not necessary to see a psychic or fortune-teller to get a speculative idea of what might or might not occur. Anyone can do that; if you want to know if anything good or horrible may conceivably happen to you, the answer is always yes. Examples include meeting a tall, dark stranger, dying in a plane crash, and winning the lottery. The future is still unpredictable, as it usually is, if you want to know if these things will ever happen to you.