Forer or For Him?

For this post, allow yourself to envision a sterile, lab environment. You're sitting in a hard, uncomfortable chair in front of a stainless steel table, all of which is in a room with white walls. The walls are barren, with a desk in the far left corner of your field of vision. A few moments pass and an experimenter comes in with a sheet labelled "Personality Test", which you are expected to fill out. You comply and wait a while longer for your results to come back. The experimenter returns and hands you a form that reads the following specifically tailored personality description:


“ You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure 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 pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. Security is one of your major goals in life.”
Now, after reading your results, you're asked to rate the accuracy of the description on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being entirely inaccurate, and 5 being perfectly on). Most likely, you'll place the accuracy of the scale on 4, if not somewhat higher. This is, of course, assuming you didn't see through the weak ruse of this result being actually tailored to you. The actual experiment found a mean rating of 4.2!

The fact that this description is so accurate, or feels so accurate, is known as The Forer Effect (aka the Barnum effect, after The famous showman P.T. Barnum ("There's a sucker born every minute", "We've got something for everyone!"). According to this theory, when people are given a number of both vague and specific claims about themselves, they tend to remember and give significance to the ones that are accuarate or favourable - while dismissing as insignificant/forgetting claims that are not. This is the foundation for an area of Mentalism known as "Cold Reading". More on this in future posts!