The Forer effect can be defined as the tendency to accept a description of personality as one’s own and very accurate when in fact it could apply to many people.
This effect was discovered by the psychologist Bertram R. Forer when, in one of his classes in 1948, he asked his students to take a personality test to later analyze the results. Forer ignored his responses and provided a single description to each of the participants as an individual analysis of their test results.
As can be seen below, this text can be assessed as vague and imprecise in defining a person:
“You have a need for other people to appreciate and admire you, and yet you are critical of yourself. Although you have some weaknesses in your personality, you are usually able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you haven’t tapped into. You tend to be disciplined and controlled on the outside but worried and insecure on the inside. Sometimes you have serious doubts about whether you have done the right thing or made the right decisions. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and you feel disappointed when you are surrounded by restrictions and limitations. You are also proud to be an independent thinker; and not to accept the statements of others without sufficient evidence. But you find it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. Sometimes you are outgoing, affable, and sociable, while other times you are introverted, cautious and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be quite unrealistic.”
He asked them to rate the evaluation from 0 to 5, with “5” meaning the recipient felt the evaluation was “excellent” and “4” meaning the evaluation was “good.” The average evaluation was 4.26.
But this discovery did not remain in the classrooms of this American psychologist at the end of the 1940s and has been replicated hundreds of times with psychology students ; the average is still around 4.2 out of 5 or a rating of 84% accuracy.
In short, Forer convinced people that he could successfully read his character. In fact, his accuracy amazed her subjects, even though his personality analysis was taken from a magazine astrology column and presented to people regardless of his zodiac sign. The Forer effect seems to explain, at least in part, why so many people new-delhi.rackons.com think that pseudosciences like astrology, astrotherapy, cartomancy, palmistry, the enneagram, divination, graphology, etc., work, since they seem to analyze the exact personality .
Studies of these pseudosciences show that they are not valid personality assessment tools, yet they have many satisfied customers who are convinced that they are accurate , accurate in their descriptions, and even predict how our week is going to go. It is also called: fallacy of personal validation; subjective validation fallacy or Barnum effect (this term was coined in 1956 by the American psychologist Paul Meehl in his analysis of how the showman and businessman PT Barnum deceived several people using unsubstantiated descriptions of personality).
The most common explanations given for the Forer effect are in terms of hope, illusion, and the inherently human tendency to try to make sense of experience (although Forer’s own explanation was in terms of human gullibility).
In fact, people tend to believe and accept descriptions about themselves according to their desire for the claims to be true and not according to the empirical accuracy (derived from experience) of the objectively measured claims. We tend to accept questionable, even untrue, statements about ourselves if we can see them as positive or flattering.
Moreover, analyzing this issue in practice, people who seek advice from psychics, mediums, fortune tellers, mind readers, graphologists, etc., usually ignore the information provided that may be considered false or questionable. In many cases, even their own words or actions provide most of the information they mistakenly attribute to a pseudoscientific advisor. Because of this type of information, they feel that their counselors have provided them with insight and personal information. Such subjective validation, however, is of little scientific value.
We are constantly trying to make sense of the deluge of disconnected information we face every day; For this reason, we become really good at filling in and giving coherence to all of this, trying to create a reasonable scenario that coheres and adapts to such information and, for this reason, sometimes we give meaning to the trickery.
We often settle for filling in the blanks to provide a coherent picture of what we hear and see; despite this, a careful examination of the evidence would reveal that these data we use are vague, confused, obscure, inconsistent, and even unintelligible. Psychic mediums, for example, often ask so many disconnected and ambiguous questions so quickly that they seem to have access to personal and far-reaching knowledge about their clients. In fact, you may not even have a clue about the client’s personal life, but the client will willingly and unknowingly offer all the necessary associations and validations.
Marks and Kamman argue that once a person encounters a belief or expectation that resolves the uncertainty (by definition uncomfortable for humans), the individual is more likely to attend to new information that confirms the belief and dismiss evidence to the contrary. (confirmation bias). This self-perpetuating mechanism consolidates the original error and builds up an overconfidence in which counterarguments are seen as too fragmentary or disjointed to undo the adopted belief.
Beyerstein suggests that a test be performed to determine whether the face validity of the aforementioned pseudosciences may be due to the Forer effect, confirmation bias, or other psychological factors. This test is simple and consists of mixing the readings of different people and then selecting which one is their own after all the clients have read all the sketches.
If sufficiently pertinent material has indeed been included, group members should, on average, be able to outperform the choice of their own analysis. Beyerstein points out that “no pseudoscientist” has successfully passed such a test.
The Forer talaja.rackons.com effect, however, only partly explains why so many people accept pseudoscientific readings as accurate evaluation procedures . Furthermore, it must be admitted that while many of the evaluative claims in a pseudoscientific reading are vague and general , some are specific. However, certain specific information is applicable to a large number of people and a certain number of specific and precise explanations are expected by chance.
As we mentioned at the beginning, there have been numerous studies on the Forer effect and these have also been evaluated from a critical perspective. Dickson and Kelly have examined many of these studies and have concluded that, in general, the results confirm this tendency to accept ambiguous appraisals of ourselves . However, in addition, it http://shimla.rackons.com/user/profile/397297 seems that positive or favorable descriptions are better accepted than negative or unfavorable ones ; but unfavorable affirmations are highly accepted by people with low self-esteem .
It has also been found that subjects can generally distinguish between descriptions that are imprecise (or applicable to a large number of people) and those that are accurate (proper or not applicable to most people). In other words, we are not blind when it comes to assessing these issues, so knowing this, the recommendation is to get used to being critical of the information about ourselves that comes from abroad.
