“There's a sucker born every minute.”
― P.T. Barnum

Introduction

Did you read today’s horoscope? What do the stars have in mind for you? What about your fortune teller?

Hopefully these questions made you laugh or at least smile a bit, rather than truly answering them and thinking about them.

I’ve never been a fan of horoscopes, fortune-tellers, psychics and all other con people there are. Sadly, today these people are a part of a massive industry which benefits from others who blindly trust them and rely upon their ‘visions’ about their future.

On the other hand, if you are amongst these people, or you know someone close to you who is, I think you would find this article beneficial.

“The Forer Effect”

In psychology the tendency of people to rate sets of subjective statements as highly accurate for their unique personality, even though they could apply to many other people is known as “The Forer Effect”.

It is named after the psychologist Bertram R. Forer who discovered this phenomenon in his classic experiment. He gave to his 39 undergraduate psychology students a Diagnostic Personality Test. After a week he gave to everyone what was told to them to be a unique description of their personality. In reality their “unique descriptions” were all the same. Then he asked his students to rate how accurate their “individual” personality descriptions on a scale of 0 to 5 are. The results have shown that the average rating was 4.3. Not only Forer ignored their answers, but the description he gave to his students was taken out of a newsstand astrology book which had absolutely nothing in common with them.

Here’s how he ‘described’ his students:

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.

Did that paragraph described your personality? Probably this description could be applied to any person there is and that’s not a surprise given the fact that all the statements inside it are related to positive traits and abilities most people would like to obtain and relate to.

For people who believe in these kind of things there are two factors which make “The Forer Effect” reality to them – the source and the content.

The source

In a later study Snyder and Larson discovered that people were more inclined to accept Forer’s descriptions of themselves if they were presented uniquely for them, rather than revealing their true nature - to be true for most people.
Another study conducted by Snyder and Shenkel in which they hired a ‘fake astrologist’ to create horoscopes with Forer’s descriptions to three groups of students, suggests that the more details a subject gives about themselves to ‘the source’ the more likely they would rate their predictions accurate.

The content

Admit it. Everybody likes to hear superlatives about themselves. One of the aspects in the content is based on positive, praising ‘facts’ about the person. Note that in every horoscope reading there is not a single truly negative statement. Even when there’s a sentence related to a negative trait of the person it’s represented as a positive thing and is related to some solution of a problem or crisis.

The other aspect is related to the general application of these ‘facts’. A common excuse here would be that a description is supposed to “fit” a human personality and there should be no surprises in the fact that there might be a place for uncertainty.

Fortune-Tellers And Magicians

While horoscopes and fake personality tests cover the non-verbal communication, cold reading is the term referred to the application of Forer’s descriptions on a verbal level.

Cold reading is practiced by ‘psychics’, fortune-tellers and all sorts of other magicians who claim they have a ‘higher knowledge’ about you and your life. In reality, they apply the same principles we discussed so far. While in horoscopes the description is already done, thus cannot be changed and manipulated, in cold reading ‘the game’ is on another level. The whole process of cold reading is based on the interaction between the actors. The psychic would always be careful about your non-verbal communication. Depending on the sings they ‘capture’, the reading ‘changes’. This means that if the subject is not aware of their behavior, the reading would seem more and more related to them, closing the psychic’s ‘trap’.

Why understanding the “Forer Effect” is important

Blindly believing in subjective opinions for your life of people who make a fortune out of it could be harmful for your future (no pun intented).

A study by Johns Hopkins University and the University of South Carolina found that people who believe in astrology tend to be more impulsive than the ones who don’t. The subjects were given pessimistic horoscopes, and then were asked to choose between going to a party or cleaning their house. People who believed in astrology went to the party, while the others preferred to stay focused and chose to clean the house.

For those who believed in star signs, trying to resist the unfavorable horoscope required mental resources and so left them open to temptation.
Participants who believed in a fixed fate did not exert any mental energy on the subject, so were able to stay focused on the day ahead.
The findings could be a boost to advertisers - who the authors said should promote indulgences like chocolate and ice cream on horoscope pages with slogans like 'life is what you make of it!'

Conclusion

Being rational and critical about new information and it’s sources reliability has never harmed somebody. I hope this short article on the Forer’s effect was beneficial to you and hopefully has provoked some questions and thoughts about this issue. If it did, please share them with me in the comment section !