The Misconception: You are skeptical of generalities.
The Truth: You are prone to believing vague statements and predictions are true, especially if they are positive and address you personally.
Based on the data I’ve collected from the comments, emails and other browsing information generated by this blog, I have a pretty good idea of who you are.
Here are my findings:
You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself.
While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them.
You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. 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 also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. But 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 rather unrealistic.
Does this sound accurate? Does it describe you?
It should. It describes everyone.
All the above statements came from a 1948 experiment by Bertram R. Forer. He gave his students a personality test and told them each one had been personally assessed, but then gave everyone the same analysis.
He asked his students to look over the statements and rate them for accuracy. On average, they rated the bogus results as 85 percent correct – as if they had been personally prepared to describe them.
The block of text above was actually a mishmash of lines from horoscopes collected by Forer for the experiment.
The tendency to believe vague statements designed to appeal to just about anyone is called the Forer Effect, and psychologists point to this phenomenon to explain why people fall for pseudoscience like biorhythms, iridology and phrenology or mysticism like astrology, numerology and tarot cards.
The Forer Effect is part of larger phenomenon psychologists refer to as subjective validation, which is a fancy way of saying you are far more vulnerable to suggestion when the subject of the conversation is you.
Since you are always in your own head, thoughts about what it means to be you take up a lot of mental space.
With some cultural variations, most people are keen on being an individual, a unique and special person whose hopes and dreams and fears and doubts are all their own.
If you have the means, you personalize everything: your car tag, your ring tone, your computer’s desktop wallpaper, your bedroom’s walls.
Everything around you says something about your personality. Cultivating an incomparable self either through consumption or creation is not something you take lightly.
Yet, somewhere between nature and nurture, we are all far more similar than you think.
Genetically, you and your friends are almost identical. Those genes create the brain which generates the mind from which your thoughts spring. Thus, genetically, your mental life is as similar to everyone else’s as the feet in your shoes.
Culturally, we differ. Our varying experiences in our varying environments shape us. Still, deep below, we are the same, and the failure to notice this can be exploited.
We don’t want to hear negative things about ourselves. If someone says to you “you’re a very honest person, but it takes people a while to really get to know you” then you’re almost certainly going to agree, because it’s not negative in any way. Turn that around and say the opposite – “you’re deceptive and people can read you like an open book” is awful. No one wants to hear that, it makes him or her sound shallow and evil.
- Paul Michael, advertising guru
If a statement is ambiguous and you think it addresses you directly, you will boil away the ambiguity by finding ways to match the information up with your own traits. You think back to all the time spent figuring out who you are, dividing your qualities from the qualities of others, and apply the same logic.
Here’s an excerpt from a real horoscope at horoscopes.com: “At some point during the day, you might have the feeling that you aren’t working hard enough to keep the forward motion going, and you might feel panic rise. This could prove a good motivating factor, but you don’t need to push yourself harder than you’re going now. You’re on a roll and it’s likely to continue. Just pace yourself.”
Now, here’s another one from the same source on the same day but a different sign: “Don’t be too hard on yourself if you’re dragging a little toward the end of the day. You’ll be able to recharge your batteries before tomorrow. In the evening, relax at home with a good book.”
Seen straight on, horoscopes describe the sort of things we all experience, but pluck one from the bunch, turn it ever so slightly, and you will see the details, the accuracy. If you believe you live under a sign, and the movement of the planets can divine your future, a general statement becomes specific.
Source: Lodestar Astrology
It is the the hope which gives subjective validation its power. If you want the psychic to be real, or the sacred stones to forecast the unknown, you will find a way to believe them even when they falter.
When you want to believe something, when you need something to be true, you will look for patterns; you connect the dots like the stars of a constellation. You will take the random and give it purpose, transmutate the chaotic into the systemic, see chance as fate.
Your brain abhors disorder. You find patterns where there are none, see faces in clouds, demons in bonfires.
Those who claim the powers of divination hijack these natural human tendencies. They know they can depend on you to use subjective validation in the moment and confirmation bias afterward. They expect you will see yourself in a mirror of a thousand faces, and then later on you see only the things which validate that reflection.
The natural human tendencies to seek order in chaos and believe in generalities both get enhanced when the information supposedly pertains to you, when it is personal.
In the 1990s, The Psychic Friends network used subjective validation to earn yearly revenues topping $115 million.
I would always come out and tell them at the beginning, “Look, I am going to do something here but I’m not claiming any special powers, although I have practiced this a lot, so you decide what is going on here.” And with this I never got challenged. I was always considered a mind reader. After every show, and I was just a little kid, these women would take me aside and tell me about their personal lives and I was blushing, and they wanted a private reading with me. I realized that I only needed to get one little fact about them and they would attribute all kinds of powers to me.
- Ray Hyman from an interview conducted by Michael Shermer in Skeptic
The psychologist Ray Hyman has spent most of his life studying the art of deception.
Before he entered the halls of science, he worked as a magician and then moved on to mentalism after discovering he could make more money reading palms than performing card tricks.
The crazy thing about Hyman’s career as a palm reader is, like many psychics, over time he began to believe he actually did have psychic powers. The people who came to him were so satisfied, so bowled over, he thought he must have a real gift.
Subjective validation cuts both ways.
Hyman was using a technique called cold reading where you start with the wide-angle lens of generalities and watch the other person for cues so you can constrict the iris down to what seems like a powerful insight into the other person’s soul. It works because people tend to ignore the little misses and focus on the hits.
As he worked his way through college, another mentalist, Stanley Jaks, took Hyman aside and saved him from delusion by asking him to try something new – tell people the opposite of what he believed their palms revealed.
The result? They were just as flabbergasted by his abilities, if not more so.
Cold reading was powerful, but tossing it aside he was still able to amaze.
Hyman realized what he said didn’t matter as long as his presentation was good. The other person was doing all the work, tricking themselves, seeing the general as the specific just like in the Forer Effect.
Mediums and palm readers, those who speak for the dead or see into the beyond for cash, depend on subjective validation.
Remember, your capacity to fool yourself is greater than the abilities of any conjurer, and conjurers come in many guises.
You are a creature impelled to hope, yearning for answers. As you attempt to make sense of the world you focus on what falls into place and neglect that which doesn’t fit, and there is so much in life which does not fit.
When you see a set of horoscopes, read all of them.
When someone claims they can see into your heart, realize all our hearts are much the same.
Last night I saw a show that not only delighted and entertained me but it engaged my intellect and made me think about my culture in a new way.
