Forer effect - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com
by Robert Todd Carroll * est. 1994
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Forer effect
The Forer effect refers to the tendency of people to rate sets of<br>statements as highly accurate for them personally even though the<br>statements could apply to many people.
Psychologist Bertram R. Forer<br>(1914-2000) found that people tend to accept vague and general personality<br>descriptions as uniquely applicable to themselves without realizing that the same<br>description could be applied to just about anyone. Consider the following as if it were<br>given to you as an evaluation of your personality.
You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be<br>critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to<br>compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to<br>your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome<br>and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made<br>the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and<br>variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also<br>pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others' statements without<br>satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to<br>others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are<br>introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.
Forer gave a personality test to his students, ignored their answers, and<br>gave each student the above evaluation. He asked them to evaluate the<br>evaluation from 0 to 5, with "5" meaning the recipient felt the evaluation<br>was an "excellent" assessment and "4" meaning the assessment was "good." The<br>class average evaluation was 4.26. That was in 1948. The test has been<br>repeated hundreds of time with psychology students and the average is still<br>around 4.2 out of 5, or 84% accurate.
In short, Forer convinced people he could successfully read their character. His<br>accuracy amazed his subjects, though his personality analysis was taken from a newsstand<br>astrology column and was presented to people without regard to their sun sign. The Forer<br>effect seems to explain, in part at least, why so many people think that pseudosciences "work". Astrology, astrotherapy, biorhythms, cartomancy, chiromancy, the enneagram, fortune telling , graphology,<br>rumpology,<br>etc., seem to work because they seem to provide accurate personality analyses. Scientific<br>studies of these pseudosciences demonstrate that they are not valid personality assessment<br>tools, yet each has many satisfied customers who are convinced they are accurate.
The most common explanations given to account for the Forer effect are in terms of<br>hope, wishful thinking, vanity and the tendency to try to make sense out of experience,<br>though Forer's own explanation was in terms of human gullibility. People tend to accept<br>claims about themselves in proportion to their desire that the claims be true<br>rather than in proportion to the empirical accuracy of the claims as measured by some<br>non-subjective standard. We tend to accept questionable, even false statements about<br>ourselves, if we deem them positive or flattering enough. We will often give very liberal<br>interpretations to vague or inconsistent claims about ourselves in order to make sense out<br>of the claims. Subjects who seek counseling from psychics, mediums, fortune tellers, mind<br>readers, graphologists, etc., will often ignore false or questionable claims and,<br>in many cases, by their own words or actions, will provide most of the information they<br>erroneously attribute to a pseudoscientific counselor. Many such subjects often feel their<br>counselors have provided them with profound and personal information. Such<br>subjective<br>validation, however, is of little scientific value.
Psychologist Barry Beyerstein believes that "hope and uncertainty evoke powerful<br>psychological processes that keep all occult and pseudoscientific character readers in<br>business." We are constantly trying "to make sense out of the barrage of<br>disconnected information we face daily" and "we become so good at...