The Forer effect
You can take this one rather than read about it. Read the description below and rate how well it fits you, and then we will talk.
- 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 on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the 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 and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary and reserved.
- Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.
- Security is one of your major goals in life.
How well does that describe you?
Everybody gets the same twelve sentences
Not a word of it was written about you. It is the description Bertram Forer handed to 39 students in 1948, after telling them it had been built from a personality test they had sat the week before. He asked them to rate its accuracy out of five.
Two differences worth naming. Forer's students were told the description had been made for them. You were told nothing of the kind, and you could see a rating box before you read a word. If your number is close to his anyway, that is a harder result than the one he got.
And this version uses twelve of his thirteen sentences. The fifth, on sexual adjustment, is left out. Most modern runs of the experiment drop it too, so the figure beside yours is his result rather than a repeat of it.
What he actually did
Forer was a clinical psychologist. He gave his class a personality inventory, took it away, and returned a week later with what each student believed was their own profile. Every profile was identical. He had assembled it the night before from a newsstand astrology book.
The class rated it 4.26 out of 5 for accuracy. Only then did he ask them to pass the sheets around. He published it that year under a title that is still the best description of the whole business: The Fallacy of Personal Validation. It appeared the following January.
The four things that make it work
- It excludes almost nobody. This is the test for any statement of this kind: who would it not fit? "You have a tendency to be critical of yourself" fits nearly everyone.
- It faces both ways at once. Sentence ten says you are sometimes outgoing and sometimes reserved. This is true for almost everyone.
- It flatters. Unused capacity. An independent thinker. Able to compensate for your weaknesses. Few audit compliments as hard as they audit criticisms, and the criticisms here are the safe kind that nearly everyone privately agrees with.
- You do the work. The sentences are empty containers, and the reader fills them with specifics from their own life. Then the fit feels uncanny, because you supplied the thing it fits.
Where you meet it
Horoscopes, most free personality quizzes, a great deal of what gets sold as workplace assessment, and most psychic readings. It is also the engine under cold reading, which is the craft of appearing to know things about a stranger without being told any of them.
What a mentalist does with it
Honest mentalism uses this openly. The performer says out loud that nothing supernatural is happening, then does a reading that lands anyway, and the effect is stronger for the admission rather than weaker. You are not being asked to believe anything. You are watching a demonstration of how easily a description can feel personal, performed by somebody who says so.
How to spot one
Ask the question from the first device: who would this not fit? A real observation excludes people. If you cannot name anybody the sentence is false about, it has told you nothing about yourself, however much it feels as though it has.
Then look for the two-sided sentence, and for flattery arriving early. Both are cheap to write and expensive to argue with.
Questions people ask
Is the Barnum effect the same as the Forer effect?
Yes, two names for one thing. Forer ran the experiment, so psychologists tend to use his name. Paul Meehl later named it after P. T. Barnum, whose shows were said to have a little something for everybody, and that version stuck in popular writing.
What is the Barnum effect in simple terms?
Reading a description vague enough to fit almost anybody, and feeling it was written about you.
Is the Barnum effect real?
Yes, and it is one of the more reliably reproduced findings in psychology. It has been repeated many times since 1948 with similar results.
This page publishes its own count alongside its own average, so the sample can be judged rather than trusted.
How do I avoid the Barnum effect?
Ask who the description would not fit. If the answer is nobody, it has not described you.
Who was Bertram Forer?
An American clinical psychologist, who published the demonstration in 1949 in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology under the title The Fallacy of Personal Validation.
Where this comes from
- The experiment and the 4.26: Forer, B. R., "The Fallacy of Personal Validation: A Classroom Demonstration of Gullibility", Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 44(1), 118–123, 1949. He ran the class in 1948 and the paper came out the following January.
- The sentences: twelve of Forer's thirteen, in his words. The fifth, on sexual adjustment, is left out, which is what most modern versions of the experiment do. It was also the least typical of the set, because it makes a specific claim rather than one that fits everybody, so it is the sentence a reader could most honestly reject. Leaving it out should if anything raise the average here slightly rather than lower it.
- The name "Barnum effect": coined by Paul Meehl in "Wanted — A Good Cookbook", American Psychologist, 11(6), 263–272, 1956. The whole paper is free to read in his university's archive.
- That it holds up when repeated: Dickson, D. H., and Kelly, I. W., "The 'Barnum Effect' in Personality Assessment: A Review of the Literature", Psychological Reports, 57(2), 367–382, 1985, which collects the studies that followed Forer. That one is behind a paywall.
- The average shown above: every rating submitted on this page, with the count published beside it.
More
This sits under mentalism. If you would rather see the same idea done with a deck, the self-working card tricks here all work for the same reason: the outcome was decided before you made your choice.
Harrison Alley
Hobbyist · Writes Sleightless
A hobbyist, not a professional. I write up the self-working end of card magic, because it is the door I would point a beginner at, and every trainer here is played through and checked before it ships.