In 1948, the American psychologist and professor Bertram Forer offered his students a test, promising that the answers to the questions would provide an accurate portrait of each student’s personality.
A week later, Forer handed out the test results to the students and asked them to mark how true they were. The average score was 4.3 out of 5. But the trick was that the results were not personalized. All students received shuffled theses from 13 items that the scientist borrowed from horoscopes. Here are some of them:
You have a lot of untapped potential in you.
You pride yourself on independent thinking and do not believe in empty claims without convincing evidence.
You are self-critical.
Sometimes you worry: Did you make the right decision? Did you do what was right?
Outwardly you are disciplined and capable of self-control, although inwardly you feel insecure and insecure.
Students had to rate each statement on a scale of zero to five, where five corresponded to “that describes me very accurately.” So Forer first confirmed the “Barnum effect,” a trick of fortune tellers and charlatans who use vague phrases in their predictions.
The term “Barnum Effect” was introduced in 1956 by American psychologist Paul Meehl. He named the technique after the famous American showman Phineas Barnum. The bottom line is that people tend to believe general predictions about their lives, but only if these predictions are positive.
What Science Says About Horoscopes
In 1985, the scientific journal Nature published a piece that proved: astrologers cannot match a person’s natal chart with their personal characteristics. American physicist Sean Carlson conducted an experiment in three stages. In the first phase, he recruited 116 volunteers and ordered for them horoscopes from a “serious” astrologer. At the second stage, Carlson asked psychologists to write character descriptions for each subject. Finally, at the third stage, the physicist found 28 astrologers, showed them his horoscopes and attached three psychological characteristics to each of them: the “star specialists” were to correlate them. Only 39 out of 116 variants matched. In scientific research this means that the result was obtained by trial and error.
In 1958, Australian and Canadian scientists Jeffrey Dean and Ivan Kelly recorded 2,000 babies who were born a few minutes apart. Over the next decades, Dean and Kelly studied more than 100 different characteristics, including occupation, anxiety levels, aggressiveness, sociability, IQ levels and abilities in sports, math and reading. The experiment showed that among the subjects were not one hundred percent “twins,” although according to the logic of astrologers, they should have the same personality traits and talents.