RE: Is your religious belief based on evidence or faith?
Then spellcraft is reason, after awhile and repetitive work. The study sounds interesting for someone more concerned with the process and scientific analysis and less for something more interested in its practical applications. When you said leave before you give away subconscious cues, well, most of witchcraft is about harnessing and manipulating that subconscious. Not to say confirmation bias is the only thing going on in a tarot reading, many other things such as a woman unhappy with her relationship is eventually going to leave it just because that's the most probable outcome, basic predictions people who study psychology can do fairly easily, as well as confirmation bias. That's why the job of a tarot reader has to be taken seriously and with a sense of morality. We guide the people we read for using the philosophy of the stories in the cards, which is basically just this philosophy that things are cyclical and any end is a beginning, you know, basic uplifting stuff. Much of tarot reading is also reading the current state of the person, which we get confirmation of in the moment by their subconscious cue admitting what we said was true. And for specificity, we just look at how happy someone comes out of the reading, do they know something more about themselves or the path they choose to follow, or are they left thinking it's a hoax. If the latter, not specific or a good reading. Tarot isn't actually about predictions. It's one part current emotional state, one part meditation on a problem, and a very small spice of most likely outcome to come from the emotion and problem, which psychologists have been able to predict with these double-blind studies and authors because they just study and write about people all the time.