In this video I describe one difficulty of assessing the accuracy of personality tests, which is that people’s perceptions of accuracy are subjective. This was demonstrated by Bertram Forer, who gave participants false generic feedback from an assessment which was still rated as highly accurate. This tendency to find personal meaning in vague statements is known as the Forer Effect, or the Barnum Effect, after P.T. Barnum. This effect can also help us to understand the success of astrologers, psychics, and fortune-tellers, who rely on hazy predictions to swindle their victims.
Forer (1949) The Fallacy of Personal Validation: https://web.archive.org/web/201603052…
Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel to see future videos! Have questions or topics you’d like to see covered in a future video? Let me know by commenting or sending me an email!
Check out my book, Master Introductory Psychology, an alternative to a traditional textbook: http://amzn.to/2eTqm5s
Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to consider how we can assess the accuracy of a personality test. So if we’ve had participants complete some personality test and we’ve gotten results, we want to know how well those results actually captured the elements of those people’s personalities.
Now one way we might do this is to think “well, we can just ask the people. We can say here’s your feedback from the test how, well do you think it actually describes your personality?”. And that would tell us whether or not the test was accurate. But the problem that we have is that people’s perceptions of how accurate the test is are going to be subjective, and this relates to a question that I posed in an earlier video which is: can we actually know ourselves, right?
So when we have a test that’s something like a self-report, we might wonder can people actually know about their own personalities and can they describe them accurately? And related to that, can they recognize when the feedback is accurate or not? So maybe it’s accurate feedback but people don’t recognize themselves in that feedback. Or maybe the feedback isn’t accurate but people think that it is.
So some research on this was conducted by Bertram Forer in the late 1940s and what Forer did was he had participants complete a personality assessment and then he gave them feedback from the assessment. He said here’s a series of statements that we’ve found based on your assessment that we think describe you and we want to know how accurate are these statements. And the participants rated these statements as being highly accurate. They said these really do capture my personality. In other words, you have an accurate test. But you might expect there’s a twist in this study and the twist is that all of the participants received the same generic feedback.
So they all got the same 10 statements regardless of how they completed the personality assessment. So essentially the assessment didn’t matter at all. That was to make them think that they were taking a personality test when really they all got the same ten statements and they all rated them as being highly accurate. So to understand this let’s take a look at some of these statements, and I’ll post a link in the video description where you can read Forer’s original paper published in 1949. So here’s a few of the statements: “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.”
So what you can see from these statements is that they’re very vague, right? They’re generic and the idea is that they could apply to anyone, right? We all have a need for people to like and admire us, I mean, we’re social animals and we are dependent on feedback from other people in order to adjust our behavior. And so everybody can come up with some examples where they’ve, you know, wanted somebody to like them or they wanted people to admire them. And we can also come up with examples where we’ve been we’ve been critical of ourselves, right?
We all have a tendency to be critical because we all make mistakes. We all say things we later wish we hadn’t said, we do things we wish we hadn’t done, and because of that we’re going to have times where we’re critical of ourselves. And so saying that, you know, you might be critical of yourself sometimes is really just saying that you’re a person, right? You’re a human who makes mistakes. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. This also seems to be true ,it seems no matter how much you accomplish you always feel like you could accomplish more. So as a result you’re going to feel you’re not living up to your fullest capacity at all times. And so, of course people will come up with different examples in their own lives of how that statement seems to be true.
Ok, so what we can see is that people have this tendency to find personal meaning in vague statements. So we give this generic feedback and everybody kind of finds a way to make it true and as a result they think that the statement is an accurate description of their personality. So this is something we have to be careful about when it comes to assessing the accuracy of personality tests. We can’t just rely on people’s subjective ratings of how accurate an assessment is.
So this is referred to as the Forer Effect; this tendency to find personal meaning in vague statements after Bertram Forer. But you’ll also see it called the Barnum Effect and this is after PT Barnum. And the reason for this is that Barnum shows were said to have “something for everyone”, just like these statements have something for everyone. Everybody can find something in the statement that makes it true for their own life. And others have said well maybe it’s the Barnum Effect because another quote often attributed to Barnum is “there’s a sucker born every minute” and maybe that’s a little bit more of a pessimistic view of this. But it brings us to a related idea that this has applications beyond just personality research.
So we can think about how this applies to things like psychic readings, astrologers, and fortune tellers, right? Because what these types of people do is they make hazy predictions, right? It might partially be true or might turn out to maybe seem true for one person and, you know, they don’t make really specific detailed predictions, right? And actually these statements that Forer used in his study actually came from astrology readings, right? And so what they do is you make some very hazy predictions about what’s going to happen and they’re generic and vague, and as a result whatever happens the person can find a way to connect it back to that statement. They can find a way for it to seem personal even though it actually wasn’t and as a result they’ll become convinced of the idea that this fortune-teller or psychic or this horoscope is actually giving them an accurate prediction.
Ok, so that’s the Forer Effect. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
