More research on praying

Sometimes science is not as objective as is made out. Take a look at this article, A Book Of Common Prayers and note this interpretive gloss by one of the researchers: "Prayer writers also tend to frame their prayers broadly, in abstract psychological language, and this allowed them to make many interpretations of the results of their prayers"
Which seems to indicate that prayer can be a bit like cold reading. And while you'll get no argument from me; it is clear that sometimes levels of abstraction do allow multiple interpretations. The point in intercessory praying would be to move over time towards more specific and focused understandings of the will of God.
The other misreading that seems to be tied up in this sentence is that writers of prayers are trying to produce prayers that can be seen as answered in multiple ways. As a writer and user of written prayers, I'd have to say that it's actually producing something that is at the start of the intercessory process and which therefore needs to be written at sufficient a level of abstraction to be apprehensible by people in a variety of situations. There's little point writing a prayer unless you're trying to allow a number of people in differing situations to find something in it that expresses something of their relationship with the Divine and their experience of the world. So it's not cold reading so much as a wide starting point.