The Barnum Effect: Why Horoscopes Are So Popular
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Loading... - Vicente Gonzalez
- 19 Jul 2022
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What if someone told you that they had created a personality profile just for you? Here is an extract: “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.”[1] If you’re thinking, “Wow! That’s so me!” you have just fallen for the Barnum effect. Let’s take a look at this bias and see why it is so effective.
What is the Barnum Effect?
The Barnum effect — also known as the Forer effect — refers to our natural tendency to believe that vague personality descriptions apply specifically to us, despite the fact that they could easily apply to anyone.
The seminal study
The Barnum effect gets its name from the famous 19th-century circus impresario P. T. Barnum, whose formula for success was always to have “a little something for everyone,” and who is famous for saying, “A sucker is born every minute,” even though he actually didn’t.
The first study on the topic was carried out in 1949 by psychologist Bertram R. Forer. He gave the 39 students in his introductory psychology class a personality test to fill in and told them that he would analyze the test results and give them back their “personalized” personality descriptions the following week. Instead, he ignored the survey results and gave them all exactly the same feedback composed of statements cobbled together from various bits of copy he had found in an astrology book on a newsstand — the statements, in fact, quoted in the intro of this article. Forer then asked the students to rate the accuracy of their profiles on a scale of 0 (poor) to 5 (perfect). They gave it an average score of 4.26. Forer called the bias “the fallacy of personal validation” and blamed it on gullibility.
A few years later, clinical psychologist Paul Meehl expressed frustration at the general — and what he saw as negligent — statements used by his colleagues in psychometric reports, and proposed “that we adopt the phrase ‘Barnum effect’ to stigmatize those pseudo-successful clinical procedures in which personality descriptions from tests are made to fit the patient largely or wholly by virtue of their triviality.” The catchier term stuck.
Since then, the effect has been widely replicated. Wherever we come from,we generally think that bland statements about our personalities are accurate, whether they come in the form of horoscopes, personality tests,or general statements about health,[6] and whether they come from experts, lay people, or computers.
How It Works
Some theorists think that we believe that general Barnum-type statements apply to us because they are universally valid and true for most people. Others think that Barnum effect statements work by managing to be both inclusive and somehow specific to the individual who reads them. Their ambiguous wording allows us to project our own interpretations onto them, and they contain so many elements that are generally applicable that we are hard-pressed to identify any item in the description that is plainly wrong. Read More...
