Hey, my dear reader, I
care about you and feel I know you quite well. Let me tell you some of your
secrets. You have a great need for other people to like 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; you have found it unwise to be too frank in
revealing yourself to others; your sexual adjustment has presented problems for
you; you prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied
when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations; at times you have serious
doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing;
and you pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others'
statements without satisfactory proof.
I also know that while you
have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them;
that you are disciplined and self-controlled outside, yet you tend to be
worrisome and insecure inside; at times you are extroverted, affable, sociable,
while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved; that some of your
aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic; and that security is one of your
major goals in life.
Impressed? Feel like I
know you personally really well? Well please don't be. I mean, I'm sure I do
know many of you pretty well, and some of you better than you think J, but all those things I wrote above are actually part
of a psychology test that Bertram R. Forer gave in 1948. It was called his Diagnostic
Interest Blank - and it was to a group of his psychology students who were told
that they would each receive a brief character vignette or profile based on
their test results. One week later Forer gave each student a supposedly
personalised sketch and asked each of them to rate it on how well it applied.
In reality, each student received the same sketch, with the traits I listed
above.
Fairly obviously (I'd
hope), what is most noticeable about the traits is that they are far from
specific to particular individuals - they are general traits and behavioural
patterns that are seen in pretty much all humans. It is a natural human
tendency to "prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become
dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations" and to "have
a tendency to be critical of yourself". As an individualised profile, there is nothing special about the
reading at all.
As anyone who has scoffed
at astrology, fortune telling, mediums who claim to contact the dead and crystal
ball gazing will know - the Forer effect (also called the Barnum effect) is a
cunning form of subjective validation which can get credulous people to part
with their money by being told things they either consciously or subconsciously
want to hear.
Now the thing is, part of
the motivations for writing my Blogs, and why I have to be hard on people
sometimes, is because the world of elected politicians, media journalists and
newspaper columnists is awash with Forer effects designed to manipulate the
public into embracing their policies, reading their newspaper articles, buying
their books, and so on.
And it's no coincidence
that the variables most strongly influencing the Forer effect in gullible
customers are very closely similar to the variables that underwrite the
misleading political narrative that so many people fall for - namely: the
subject believes that the analysis applies chiefly to them and their life
conditions; the subject too easily defers to authority of the speaker without
much critical evaluation of what's being said; and lastly, the subjects prime themselves
to narrowly focus on all the positives they hear while blocking out or not
considering the negative connotations (as per Bastiat's Seen
and Not Seen, which forms the basis of most
economic and political errors of judgement).
The Trump election - which
I'm not going to go on about repeatedly in Blog posts - provides an interesting
window into this effect in action, but also with a strange twist of tonic. On
the one hand many of the Clinton
