The Forer Effect is a trick used by astrologers, psychics, and social psychologists. Given a list of statements like these:
- 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.
… most people will agree that the statements accurately describe them. In fact, most people will feel like they’re unusually accurate descriptions, which is how astrologers get you.
What statements show a Forer effect? Wikipedia just says they should be vague and somewhat positive. Can we do better?
A lot of Forer statements above are about the contrast between internal experience and outward behavior — for example “disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside”. All of this is implicitly comparative — since there’s no objective measure for how disciplined you should be, “disciplined” implicitly means “more disciplined than other people”. Take this into account, and you can rephrase many of these statements as “Although everyone else is really X, you are Y pretending to be X”.
Now the trick is obvious. You can access your internal experience, and you know what kind of things you’re pretending. But you can only access everyone else’s external presentation, which (absent specific evidence otherwise) you mostly believe. So whenever everyone is Y pretending to be X, it will feel like “although everyone else is really X, I am Y pretending to be X”.
Consider the fifth statement above: “Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you”. Everyone has to go through their own sexual adjustment. But usually they hide it from everyone else except maybe some unlucky early sexual partners. Sexual adjustment is terrible, and so without any opportunity to calibrate, most people assume it can’t possibly be quite that bad for other people. So if an astrologer reads a star-chart and predicts “I bet you had an unusually tough sexual adjustment”, most people will agree the astrologer is right.
Scott Alexander, “Forer Statements as Updates And Affirmations”, Astral Codex Ten, 2022-07-27.
October 25, 2022
QotD: How con-men and charlatans use the Forer Effect
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