New Year: The Barnum-Forer Effect Explains Why Astro Predictions Seem So Accurate To Us. What Is It?

It’s the first day of the new year. A lot of us will look at predictions for the new year, sometimes according to birth chart, for some zodiac sign. While some swear by such forecast, others are not so convinced.

And psychology has its own answers to why such personality descriptions, made in such predictions, appear so accurate to us. It has something to do with what was named after PT Barnum, a 19th century showman who promoted hoaxes and pranks.

What is the Barnum effect?

The Barnum effect leads people to believe that personality descriptions are accurate when they could apply to anyone, a report by DW states. It is named after PT Barnum, a nineteenth-century showman who made a name for himself by promoting hoaxes and deceptive pranks.

This psychological effect can persuade us that the method or person behind such hazy statements and predictions is genuine — or even that they possess supernatural abilities.

The experiment of Forer

Bertram Forer, a psychologist, facilitated this experiment with students from his introductory psychology course in the 1950s, the report says.

Forer administered a psychology test – his so-called “Diagnostic Interest Blank” – to 39 of his psychology students, who were told that their test results would result in a brief personality vignette. One week later, Forer gave each student a supposedly personalised vignette and asked them to rate how well it applied. In reality, each student was given the same vignette, which included the following items:

• 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.
• Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you.
• 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.

He read a text to each of his students, explaining that it was the result of a personality test they had previously completed, and thus very personalised.

When all of the students received their scores and the text, Forer asked them to raise their hands if they thought it did a good job of describing their personalities. When they saw that almost all of the students’ hands were up, they were perplexed.

Forer then began reading one of the texts aloud. When the students realised that all of the texts were the same, they burst out laughing.

Most of us can easily relate to these general descriptions because we all have the characteristics they mention, albeit to varying degrees, the report explains.

The extent to which we have those characteristics, rather than their absence or presence, defines us. So saying, “You can be an introvert and an extrovert at times” is analogous to saying you have a heart and two lungs.

We can all be shy at times, but people with social anxiety, for example, experience shyness to a much greater extent than those who can overcome it and perform on stage.

“The individual is a unique configuration of characteristics, each of which can be found in everyone, but to varying degrees,” Forer wrote in a 1949 paper describing his previous findings.

Forer now had evidence of how flawed our judgement is and how easily we can be duped into accepting pseudo-scientific descriptions or predictions about ourselves.

Cognitive Bias

Forer’s experiment also demonstrates a type of cognitive bias.

Cognitive biases are unconscious errors in thinking that result from issues with memory, attention, and other mental errors, a report by Simply Psychology says.

These biases are the result of our brain’s efforts to simplify the incredibly complex world we live in.

Some of the most common types of cognitive bias are confirmation bias, hindsight bias, self-serving bias, anchoring bias, availability bias, the framing effect, and inattentional blindness. The false consensus effect is another example.

Cognitive biases have direct consequences for our safety, interactions with others, and the way we make decisions in our daily lives. Although these biases are unconscious, we can train our minds to adopt a new pattern of thinking and reduce the effects of these biases.

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