Hi everyone it’s 9 am and your listening to your favourite radio ! Today I suggest a little experiment about astrology. If I tell you :
- “You seem calm and in control on the outside, but on the inside you sometimes feel uncertain and afraid”.
- “You are an independent thinker and accept new ideas only after careful evaluation”.
- “At times you are shy, but in some circumstances, you can be outgoing and talkative”.
Do you recognize yourself in most of those statements ? It turns out that the majority of people find those descriptions true for them. It’s called Barnum Effect, and astrologists take advantage of that to wright horoscopes.
Barnum Effect, named after the American showman Phineas Taylor Barnum, is a cognitive bias. The character of Phineas Taylor Barnum appears in the recent movie The Greatest Shoman where the protagonist convinced people to think that he understands them better than they do themselves with using this effect.
Barnum Effect is also called Forer Effect because of Bertram Forer, the psychologist who discovered this effect. Forer made an experiment where he gave his psychology students a personality test. Later he gave the following analysis to each student :
“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 have pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. At time you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.”
After that, he asked the students to assess the relevance of the analysis by giving a rating between 0 and 5. And guess what ? The mean was 4.26. So, according to Barnum Effect, people tend to view general description, that could apply to many people, as being highly accurate for them individually.
Then, researchers like Dickson and Kelly made more studies and revealed 3 factors leading individuals to consider the analysis as relevant :
- The individual has to be convinced that the analysis only match with him.
- Then he has to consider the assessor as an authority.
- And finally, the analysis has to be mostly positive. Indeed, most of the time the descriptions made in horoscopes for example are positive. Barnum Effect works best for positive statements. People are less likely to match with a negative description.
As we said, Barnum Effect is used in astrology but also in mentalism and illusionism like in The Greatest Showman we mentioned earlier. In mentalism, this technique is also known as “cold reading”. The mentalists use general truth leading people to react and unconsciously reveal themselves little by little. The objective of this technique is to gather as much informations as possible about a given person with an imperceptible effort. When put together, this informations can reveal the social and psychological profile of the subject.
Well I hope you enjoyed this subject and now I hope you will have a critical view when you read your horoscope ! See you next week for another topic !
Sources :
A. (2021, 23 mai). Effet Barnum : Le comprendre, s’ ; en servir et s’ ; en protéger. Programmation Neuro-Linguistique. https://programmation-neuro-linguistique.coach/techniques-persuasion/effet-barnum/
Deswarte, E. (s. d.). L’effet Barnum. Psychologie-sociale. https://psychologie-sociale.com/index.php/fr/experiences/attributions-causales-et-de-responsabilite/154-l-effet-barnum
Forer, B. R. (1949). The fallacy of personal validation : a classroom demonstration of gullibility. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 44(1), 118‑123. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0059240