The strange Forer Effect

The Forer effect can be defined as the tendency to accept a description of personality as one’s own and very accurate when in reality it could apply to many people.

This effect was discovered by the psychologist Bertram R. Forer when, in one of his classes in 1948, he asked his students to take a personality test to later analyze the results. Forer ignored their answers and gave a single description to each of the participants. as an individual analysis of your test results. As can be seen below, said text can be assessed as vague and imprecise in defining a person:

“You have the need for other people to appreciate and admire you, and yet you are critical of yourself. Although you have some weaknesses in your personality, you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not taken advantage of. You tend to be disciplined and controlled on the outside but worried and insecure on the inside. Sometimes you have serious doubts about whether you have done the right thing or made the right decisions. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and feel disappointed when surrounded by restrictions and limitations. You are also proud to be an independent thinker; and not to accept the statements of others without sufficient evidence. But you find it unwise to be very frank in revealing yourself to others. Sometimes you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while other times you are introverted, cautious, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be quite unrealistic.”
He asked them to rate the evaluation from 0 to 5, with “5” meaning the recipient felt the evaluation was “excellent” and “4” meaning the evaluation was “good.” The average evaluation was 4.26.

But this discovery did not remain in the classrooms of this American psychologist at the end of the 40s and has been replicated hundreds of times with psychology students; the average is still around 4.2 out of 5 or a rating of 84% accuracy.

In short, Forer convinced people that he could successfully read his character. In fact, his accuracy astonished his subjects, although the analysis of his personality was taken from an astrology column. from a magazine and was introduced to people regardless of their zodiac sign. The Forer effect seems to explain, at least in part, why so many people think that pseudosciences such as astrology, astrotherapy, cartomancy, palmistry, the enneagram, divination, graphology, etc., work, since they seem to analyze the exact personality .

Studies of these pseudosciences show that they are not valid personality assessment tools, however, they have many satisfied customers who are convinced that they are accurate.who are right in their descriptions and even predict how the week is going to go. It is also called: fallacy of personal validation; subjective validation fallacy or Barnum effect (This term was coined in 1956 by the American psychologist Paul Meehl in his analysis of how the showman and businessman PT Barnum deceived several people using unsubstantiated personality descriptions).

The most common explanations given for the Forer effect are in terms of hope, illusion, and the intrinsically human tendency to try to make sense of experience (although Forer’s own explanation was in terms of human credulity).

In fact, people tend to believe and accept descriptions about themselves in accordance with their desire for the claims to be true rather than in relation to the empirical accuracy (derived from experience) of the objectively measured claims. We tend to accept questionable, even false, statements about ourselves if we can consider them positive or flattering.

What’s more, analyzing this issue in practice, people who seek advice from psychics, mediums, fortune tellers, mind readers, graphologists, etc., usually ignore the information provided that may be considered false or questionable. In many cases, even their own words or actions provide most of the information they mistakenly attribute to a pseudoscientific advisor. Because of this type of information, they feel that their counselors have provided them with deep and personal information. Such subjective validation, however, is of little scientific value.

We are constantly trying to make sense of the avalanche of disconnected information we face every day; For this reason, we become really good at filling in and giving coherence to all this, trying to create a reasonable scenario that coheres and adapts to such information and, for this reason, we sometimes make sense of nonsense.

We often fill in the blanks to provide a coherent picture of what we hear and see; Despite this, a careful examination of the evidence would reveal that these data we use are vague, confusing, obscure, inconsistent and even unintelligible. Psychic mediums, for example, often ask so many disconnected and ambiguous questions so quickly that they give the impression of having access to personal, transcendental knowledge about their clients. In fact, you may not even have any clues about the client’s personal life, but he or she will willingly and unknowingly offer all the necessary associations and validations.

Marks and Kamman argue that once a person encounters a belief or expectation that resolves uncertainty (by definition uncomfortable for humans), the individual will be more likely to attend to new information that confirms the belief and discard evidence to the contrary. (confirmation bias). This self-perpetuating mechanism consolidates the original error and overconfidence accumulates in which opposing arguments are seen as too fragmentary or disjointed to undo the espoused belief.

Beyerstein suggests that a test be performed to determine whether the face validity of the pseudosciences mentioned may be due to the Forer effect, confirmation bias, or other psychological factors. This test is simple and consists of mixing the readings of different people and then selecting which one is yours after reading all the clients and all the sketches.

If sufficiently relevant material has indeed been included, group members should, on average, be able to overcome the choice of their own analysis. Beyerstein points out that “no pseudoscientist” has successfully passed a test of this type.

The Forer effect, however, only partially explains why so many people accept pseudoscientific readings as accurate evaluation procedures.. Furthermore, it must be admitted that, although many of evaluation statements in a pseudoscientific reading are vague and general, some are specific. However, csome specific information is applicable to a large number of people and a certain number of specific and precise explanations are to be expected by pure chance.

As we mentioned at the beginning, there have been numerous studies on the Forer effect and these have also been evaluated from a critical perspective. Dickson and Kelly have examined many of these studies and have concluded that, in general, the results confirm this tendency to accept ambiguous evaluations of ourselves. However, in addition, It seems that positive or favorable descriptions are better accepted than negative or unfavorable ones; but unfavorable statements are highly accepted by people with low self-esteem.

It has also been found that subjects can generally distinguish between descriptions that are imprecise (or applicable to a large number of people) and those that are precise (own or not applicable to most people). I mean, We are not blind when it comes to evaluating these issues, so knowing this, the recommendation is to get used to being critical of the information about ourselves that comes from outside.