When someone claims to have a psychic ability, there is the extraordinary possibility that they're telling the truth about a genuine ability, but the more mundane possibilities are obviously that they are consciously lying about it for money and attention or that they have managed to convince themselves that they have an ability they don't in fact possess.
All of us are capable of deceiving ourselves from time to time about one thing or another, and even more so if we see this as a problem that only other people are susceptible to. Many self-professed fortune tellers and mediums are conceivably in this category, but this is unlikely to be true of the spoon bending performances of Uri Geller because of the preparation and ingenuity that would be required to fake them. It just isn't the sort of thing a sane person could innocently convince themselves they could do if they can't. In cases like this, we could exclude self-deception as an explanation leaving genuine paranormal ability or deliberate, premeditated deception as the only options. If we assume for the sake of argument that there is no such thing as paranormal ability, some interesting questions arise about the psychology of people like Geller.
