“Everthing is slightly muddled today so you should be very careful, take in your surroundings and ask important questions before making any serious decisions. Keep in mind that that green grass on the other side of the fence is sometimes mainly weeds. They haven’t yet found a material strong enough to make chains that can keep your positive energy from achieving anything it really wants.”
Sound like a typical horoscope reading? Bertram Forer would probably think so. The Forer Effect is named after this groundbreaking psychologist whose name has become synonymous with exposing gullibility. The Forer Effect is also often known as the Barnum Effect and that appellation is related to the famous P.T. Barnum dictum that every minute that passes by produces yet another sucker whose money can be easily taken if only you apply yourself to exploiting the weaknesses inherit in the human psyche when it comes to wanting to believe each of us is entirely unique.
The year was 1948. Truman defeated Dewey. Laurence Olivier hit screens across the world as Hamlet. Al Gore and Rhea Perlman were born on the same day. And inside a classroom Bertram Forer handed out a personality test to his students. The students dutifully answered the questions as best and honestly as they could. Each of them received the exact same evaluation:
“You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.”
The students were instructed to read this personal evaluation and grade it based on a scale of 0 to 5 in which a grade of 5 meant that they agreed wholeheartedly with Forer’s assessment of their personality. When Forer did the math, he discovered that the average assessment of his entirely fictional and unrelated personality assessment of the students came in at 4.26, meaning that most of the students concluded that the assessment was slightly better than good, but significantly less than perfect. That same test has been applied multiple times in many situations since then and the result continually winds up around the same average.
The point?
The point is related to where Forer retrieved his personality assessment with which so many students discovered a strong affinity. Forer chose his assessment from an astrological horoscope column. In other words, almost every student read the exact same horoscope and believed that it applied distinctly and individually to him or her. The Forer Effect remains the strongest research evidence yet to indicate the folly of belief in astrological readings.
The deeper point to Forer’s experiment reveals a curious tendency among humans to apply beliefs about their own personalities based more on what they want to believe about themselves rather than to any factual evidence to the contrary. The opening paragraph of this article contains (in slightly rewritten form) three different horoscope readings from three different astrological signs. And yet, it would be hard to imagine anybody not accepting that the entire paragraph could relate specifically to him regardless of whether he is the Libra dreamer, the compassionate contradiction that is the person born under the sign of Cancer, the bullheaded and stubborn Taurean or the adventurous Sagittarian.
What drives the person who puts their faith in not just astrology but any kind of belief in a fortune based on generic information is hope. The Forer Effect states that people have a natural tendency to ignore those aspects of their personality that fail to conform to the interpretation of their psyche in an attempt to locate truthful components. What is at the heart of the Forer Effect is the willingness to bypass details and specifics in exchange for a beneficent interpretation of generalities. In other words, your willingness to go along with something like a horoscope expands in direct relation to how much you need to be admired, are self-critical, question your decisions, respond negatively to the imposition of restrictions and set up unrealistic expectations.
The important thing to keep in mind is not that you may be a sucker, necessarily, but that so many people out there do subscribe to the belief that suckers abound and will do all they can to turn you into one, at least temporarily.