July 23, 2015 • 46 mins
From palm-reading fortune tellers to professionally-administered Myers Briggs test, everyone's a sucker for a an ego-stroking personality assessment. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the subtle forces of the Forer effect.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to Blow Your Mind from how stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
today we're gonna be talking about the science of personality assessments.
Uh and full disclosure, we wanted to let you know
(00:24):
that the reason we thought to do this topic today
was that How Stuff Works actually hired an audience research
firm to study our podcast audiences through surveys and statistical profiling. Yeah,
so if you took that survey that we put up
on Facebook, that's what that was all about. Yeah, unless
you think that this was just out of curiosity, you
(00:44):
should always keep in mind that marketers and advertisers want
to know everything about you, not because you're so interesting,
but because it helps them sell you snack boxes and underwear. Yes,
but anyway, they offered a personalized psychometric inventory for each
of the individual podcast audiences, so each podcast got their
own and it was based on a test originally compiled
(01:07):
by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology subdivision of
the a p A. And I thought this was really cool,
Like they came up with a psychological profile. It was
basically a personality sketch that listed key personality traits that
were characteristics unique to each podcast audience. And so I
picked like five of the traits they listed as unique
(01:29):
to the archetypical stuff to blow your mind listener. So
I thought you guys might be interested in this. Yeah, yeah,
let's roll these out and then as we do, you
can just think, well, to think yourself. Does that jive
with my outlook on life and how I view myself? Yeah,
so here we go. Number One, you tend to be
independent thinkers, hesitant to accept the statements of others without
(01:50):
adequate proof. Number two, you prefer a certain amount of
change and variety and become dissatisfied when himmed in by
restrictions and limitations. Three at times, you experience varying degrees
of social anxiety. Number four, you were motivated by a
strong desire for fairness and reciprocity in social situations. Five
at times, you have serious doubts as to whether you've
(02:12):
made the right decision or done the right thing. So,
before we get into the meat of today's episode, I
just wanted to mention that if you're a regular listener
and you want to let us know how accurately this
profile describes you. You can email us at blow the
Mind at how stuff works dot com and give us
feedback on on the sketch. And unfortunately, everything I just
(02:33):
said was made up. Yes, yes, this is a little
slice of fiction, a slice of necessary fiction to get
into our topic today. Yeah. So there was no audience survey,
no survey data. We just threw together that sketch from
a few pre existing generic descriptions. Hopefully nobody is upset
about it, but if you are, you can contact how
(02:53):
Stuff Works chief legal consultant Richard W. Glazer. That's right. Uh,
but be honest, now, were you thinking for a second, Yeah,
that sounds like me, I have to admit, when I've
read through them, even knowing that that we have just
made this up, I was thinking, Yeah, that's how I
view it. As a co host of the show. Yeah,
I am completely susceptible to this effect we're going to
(03:14):
talk about today. I think if I had been in
the audience's position here, I would have been like, Yep,
that describes me. I think, at least in the kind
of egotistical, self absorbed, self congratulatory way. We sometimes I'll
tend to be. I'm sure that I tend to be
on the inside. Uh. If you weren't convinced, congratulations for
being a skeptical no at all. But if you were convinced,
(03:37):
don't feel ashamed because you just displayed susceptibility to an
effect that shows up in most humans, no matter how
smart we are, and this is known as the former
effect fo r e er or the Barnum effect. Both
names refer to the exact same thing, and we'll probably
use the terms interchangeably today, but mainly we're gonna use
(03:57):
Barnum effect in the podcast because that's easier to say
out loud. So the Barnum version of the name comes
from the Circus Kingpin P. T. Barnum, and I'm thinking
it could be ascribed to two different quotes attributed to Barnum,
either that there's a sucker born every minute, which apparently
he did not actually say, or that Barnum had something
(04:21):
for everybody, and I think that latter one might be
what's key here. And if he didn't have something for everybody,
he wanted to sell a product, right, the circus product
is intended for a wide audience, and he wants to
draw in as many people's possible. Yeah, he's gotta he's
got to push those jugglers, you know. But the Forwer
title comes from the American psychologist Bertram Our Forwer, and
(04:45):
he noticed this effect in a classic paper he published
in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in nineteen
forty nine. And this paper was called the Fallacy of
Personal Validation, A classroom demonstration of gullibility. Now, to give
you a little background on four Bertram R. Four He
was born in nineteen fourteen died in two thousand, American psychologist,
(05:08):
again famous for this personality test and his students. But
he served as a psychologist and administrator in a military
hospital in France during the Second World War, and then
he worked in l a at a veteran's mental clinic.
And also he had a private practice in Malibu. Yeah,
so what did Forer test with his students. Fourer had
(05:31):
previously discussed with his students a sort of proto personality
quiz called the Diagnostic interest blank or d i B.
And this was a qualitatively evaluated test that he explained
in the following language. He said quote, the d I
B consists of a list of hobbies, reading materials, personal characteristics,
(05:52):
job duties, and secret hopes and ambitions of one's ideal person.
The test is interpreted qualitatively and personality dynamics are inferred
along line similar to projective tests. So this is a
it's supposed to be qualitatively evaluated by a perceptive and
trained professional, somebody who knows what they're doing. And some
(06:14):
of his students, when they heard about the test, asked
to take it. They wanted to take the d IB
and receive these tailored personality evaluations because you know, who
doesn't want to take a personality quiz and learn a
little bit about themselves? Right? I mean that's it just
speaks to our egos as well as you know, most
people's desires for self improvement. You know, we want to
(06:35):
we want we want to fill out that Dungeons and
Dragon's character sheet with our own attributes and figure out
what we need A tweak with a magical ring or two? Right?
I am chaotic neutral for real. So Fourer acquiesced to
their desire and a group of thirty nine students all
took the test and handed in their papers. And then
one week later Fourer met with the students again for
(06:56):
class and he handed back the individually tailored personalityty vignettes,
and each one was a list of thirteen perceived personality
attributes under the student's name, and the students were instructed
to keep the results private. That part was important because,
in fact, thirteen personality features listed on each student's paper
(07:16):
had nothing to do with what the students wrote on
their test. Uh In fact, they were all exactly the
same for each one of the thirty nine students. So
there were thirteen statements listed on each of these thirty
nine identical personality sketches, and we're gonna read through them
real quick. Number one, you have a great need for
other people to like and admire you. You have a
(07:38):
tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great
deal of unused capacity, which you have not turned your advantage.
While you have some personality weaknesses, you were 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
(07:58):
doubts as to whether you've made the right decision or
done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of
change in variety and become dissatisfied when himmed in by
restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker
and do not accept other statements without satisfactory proof. You
have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing
yourself to others. At times you were extroverted, affable, sociable,
(08:20):
while at other times you were introverted, wary, reserved. Some
of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. Security is
one of your major goals in life. So the brilliance
of these is that, like just going through them there,
knowing again that these are false, that these are just
you know, could be thrown out to anybody. I found
(08:41):
myself nodding my head and saying, yeah, I can, definitely
I can. If I don't buy that statement outright, I
can at least pick some data from my own personal
history that could support that theory. Yeah, and that is
exactly what the test ends up relying on. So for
reveals in a footnote of his pay or that quote,
these statements came largely from a new stand astrology book.
(09:05):
So he just found a horoscope and picked out random
statements that could apply to a capricorn a sagittarius, whoever
it is, and students were then asked to rate on
a scale of zero to five, with zero being poor
and five being perfect, the accuracy of the d I
B as a test, and then the accuracy of their
(09:27):
own individual sketch as a portrayal of their personality. And
then he also asked the students to go down the
list and mark each of the thirteen statements as true, false,
or question mark. Here were the results as rated by
the students. The d I B got only one three,
it got twenty five fours, and it got thirteen fives,
(09:49):
So thirteen students thought it was perfect, thought it was
really good, and one thought it was okay. So all
of the students but one gave the test a four
or five for accuracy. And then when it came to
the individual sketches, all but five students rated their sketch
of four or a five, So the students overwhelmingly thought
(10:13):
the test was pretty good, too perfect, And an interesting
thing for Or points out when comparing the student ratings
of the test and the sketch against their item by
item breakdown, is this quote for some individuals, the presence
of eight true statements among the thirteen was considered sufficient
evidence for acceptance of the sketch as perfect. M let
(10:37):
that sink in for a second, eight out of thirteen
is sixty two per cent. So for some students, even
with these extremely vague statements, just getting sixty two percent
right about them was enough for the test to count
as a perfect hit. Yeah, how does that? How does
(10:57):
that work? What's your definition of perfectnesses? Don't know? Well,
I think it comes down to something four explains in
his paper later about the discrepancy between our sort of
like qualitative or quantitative analysis of the results and then
the amount of confidence we're willing to attribute to a
diagnostic tool as a whole. But what happened here? I mean,
(11:18):
subsequent studies have repeatedly demonstrated the Barnum effect under various circumstances,
So it's pretty safe to assume that four students weren't
just particularly gullible. In Art Carroll's entry in the Skeptics Dictionary,
he claims, quote, the test has been repeated hundreds of
times with psychology students, and the average is still around
(11:39):
four point two out of five or eighty four percent accurate.
So why are we so eager to gobble up worthless
effectively random assessments of ourselves. Well as as we'll discuss
the you know, A lot of the answer lies in
the presentation. You know, where this test was was taken
(11:59):
and who has given it to them, and in the
language in which it was administered. Right, it's a psychology professor,
it's a you know, an authority figure administering this test
to the students in a classroom in a center of learning. Uh.
And it's wrapped in the expected psychological lingo. Yes, But
there's an even deeper issue going on with the nature
(12:21):
of these evaluations that makes them work. And it's based
on the interplay between two principles that four points out
in his paper. And Uh. He four is referring to
certain types of people like crystal gazers as one term
he uses. I think that means like somebody looking into
a crystal ball. He's talking about the psychics of his
day and and things like that. He says, they might
(12:42):
even unwittingly make use of these principles, but they are
making use of them. And the principles are universal validity
and personal validation. That his term is personal validation. But
today we might know this as subjective validation, and the
idea of universal validity is the it pretty much every
single psychological trait can be observed in some degree in everybody.
(13:09):
I mean, think about it like if I say, at
times you experience varying degrees of social anxiety. Yeah, that's
that's everybody. Yeah, yeah, with it with a few just
complete space aliens, you know, eliminated from the mix. Everybody
deals with some level of anxiety. Right, So another way
(13:30):
of thinking about this is casting a wide net. And
you can see a very similar parallel practice if you
watch a psychic a group of people doing a cold
reading on a crowd. So the psychic might stand up
in front of a crowd and say, okay, I'm getting
something from a spirit, a spirit of someone known to
someone in the room. It's an older person, an older
(13:50):
person named John or Jack. Does that mean anything to anyone?
Something something starting with John or Jack, something starting with
the letter J. And then one hand goes and an
uncle named Jefferson exactly, Yeah, oh man, my uncle Jehosaphat
And then uh, and then the psychic says, yes, that's right,
Jehosaphat or Jefferson is here with us. And now we
(14:12):
can talk to Jeffer Josa Fat And then the client
later says, Wow, the psychics somehow knew something about Jehosaphen,
when in fact the client has supplied the relevant specifics themselves.
The psychic was just trawling with a very large net.
It would be extremely weird if nobody in the room
(14:32):
knew of a deceased family member whose name started with Jay. Yeah. Yeah,
it's just the odds are with you that you're gonna
catch somebody with that very vague, very general bit of bait. Yeah.
But then the other principle is this principle of personal
or subjective validation. So how do you test the validity
of a diagnostic instrument, whether it's a horoscope or a
(14:55):
psychic or a supposedly professional and valid psychological personality test.
You probably don't want to test it by using it
on somebody and then saying how accurately did this describe you?
Because this is subject to what for would call the
fallacy of personal validation. Because you are you, and because
(15:15):
you know the story of your own life so well,
you can always find autobiographical hooks to hang almost any
statement on, especially vague and general statements. So we mentioned
the example a minute ago of social anxiety. Can you
ever think of an instance where social anxiety had a
meaningful role in your life? Yeah? Of course, Yeah, every day.
(15:41):
Even somebody who's not particularly anxious, who doesn't have many
problems with social anxiety, can think of an instance that
was meaningful to them. Yeah, at the very least they
were once children, and they had to within some point
in their life where they felt a little awkward. Yeah.
And so simply put, subjective validation is when you find
personal and unique accuracy in statements that could apply to
(16:02):
many or all people. Yeah. And part of this just
gets into our our our enormous capacity, uh, to place
ourselves in any story too, just the fact that we
are empathic organisms. Yeah, yeah, Um, we're always seeking meaning
that relates to us. This sort of ties into something
we talked about a while back in the Science of
Coincidence episode, where you know, we're pattern seeking creatures, and
(16:26):
we're constantly trying to find the pattern that means something
to me. Yeah, you know, you're talking about our ability
to even essentially put ourselves in the shoes of extreme cases. Um,
you know this This immediately makes me think of the
popularity of uh, you know, any kind of fiction that
deals with individuals with mental illness or in extreme cases, um,
(16:49):
serial murderers. You know, because if you have a well
executed serial killer story, um, you can still you still
end up investing yourself in that person on some level.
You end up empathizing with at least some aspect of
their you know, ultimately broken psyche. Right. Yeah, so if
you if you can connect with the serial killer's relationship
(17:11):
with his mother or something like that, you're like, oh, no,
is this really the story of me? Yeah, or like, uh,
I'm obviously thinking of Hannibal. Yeah, Hannibal actually came up
a couple of times in my mind. I'm looking through
the research here, Um, I think it was Joyce Carol
Oates has a book called Zombie that's essentially a retelling
(17:32):
of of the Jeffrey Dalmer uh case, but with you know,
fictionalized account and so even in this year, you're reading
in it and you can't actually empathize with the murderous
aspects of the main character. But ultimately it's about a
guy who feels lost in life and doesn't exactly know
where he fits, and you know, who can't empathize on
(17:54):
some level at some point in their their timeline with
an example like that, right, Yeah, in a way where
all that cannibal Yeah, it makes me wonder if you
if you administered a test like Forest test, and you
had all of the personality statements leaning more towards the
darker and the insane, like, what the acceptance level would be. Well,
(18:16):
there actually is some commentary on that in the literature,
and we can get to that in a bit. What
are some other studies that What have other studies revealed
about this, uh, this property? Well, there have been number one.
It's just been reproduced many many times. And the strength
of the effect varies when you change some of the
test conditions, and we can talk about that later, but
(18:36):
there's a pretty consistent result that the subjects of personality
assessments tend to rate assessments as highly accurate in a
way that's unique to them, even though the statements within
the assessment are vague in general, and sometimes even when
many of the individual statements in the list are subjectively
perceived as wrong by the client. Remember when we talked
(18:58):
about the people who got eight out of thirteen right,
said that the test described them perfectly. So what's the
impact of this in practice. Well, one of the things
that Forror was personally worried about was that this could
be used to validate or prop up the accuracy of
(19:19):
very bad tools. So let's say you're an unscrupulous psychic
or an unscrupulous psychotherapist. You can potentially use a combination
of subjective validation and universal validity to get a very
unhealthy amount of leverage over another person's common sense, and
the exchange might go something like this. The psychic or
(19:41):
unscrupulous psychologist makes a diagnosis of a person's personality, taking
advantage of these, you know, very vague general traits and
then leaning on the client's tendency towards subjective validation of
the test. The client reads these things like in the
test we talked about and says, yep, that's me, and
then assumes that the psychic or the unscrupulous psychologist has
(20:04):
access to powerful and accurate skills or diagnostic tools. Then
the psychic or unscrupulous psychologist makes bolder, more specific, less
credible diagnoses or or predictions that might not have been
accepted on the first go round. But at this point
the client thinks, well, he knew what he was talking
about the last time, so he must know this time.
(20:25):
I'm going to listen to him. Yeah, I mean it's
kind of a confidence trick, right, I mean, it's a
it's it's a matter of producing this sort of magical trick,
this illusion that proves to the patient or the the mark,
or however you want to want to look at them,
the customer, proves to them that you have insight into
who they are and what they're all about. And then
(20:47):
when they start making comments that that don't jive as well,
we just attribute it to their they know more about
us than we know about us. Yeah, I remember when
I was right last time. It's also very similar to
the con maneuver. If you're trying to con somebody out
of a large amount of money, say like, hey, invest
in my pyramid scheme. It'll you know, I can give
(21:07):
give you a million dollars. First you ask for a
very small investment, and then you pay out what you
promised on that small investment, and then they say, wow, okay,
well it seems to work. And so then when you
ask for a bigger investment, you can fly off to
Hawaii with the money you probably wouldn't fly to Hawaii?
Where would you fly to Cayman Islands or the Far
East I'm thinking, or the halls of Dagon. Yeah, always
(21:30):
a good place that it's tough to get the currency
exchanged properly there, but still still a good place. A
lot of hanging out in the depths, right, And this
can be applied to more different types of diagnostic tools
and instruments than you might think. I mean, so the
obvious ones we've talked about are like the personal powers
of a person who claims to be a psychic, or
(21:51):
a certain type of psychological test, any one of these
personality tests you can take. But other things might be
methods of discerning personality, These like graphology. Have you ever
heard about graphology? Not until preparing this episode now yes.
So So four claimed that he was prompted to perform
this experiment after he was accosted in a nightclub by
(22:13):
a graphologist. And a graphologist as a person who believes
they can tell you all about your personality by looking
at your handwriting. You know, this makes me think that
this nightclub was either really cool or are really lame,
Like there's no in between there If it involves being
approached by a grapholo. It sounds pretty cool to me.
I never get approached by graphologists when I'm out having
(22:35):
a you know, at a bar or somewhere. I wish
I would be, because that would be really interesting. But yeah,
so graphology is widely considered a baseless pseudoscience, though I'm
sure some people still believe in it, and that's kind
of scary. But four wanted to demonstrate that he could,
with deliberately faulty techniques, produce assessments that clients would find
(22:55):
just as accurate as those provided by a professional graphologist.
So repeat the same pattern I talked about a minute
ago with the with the psychic or the unscrupulous psychologist,
where they proved themselves and the and the accuracy of
their diagnostic tools with some very general, vague statements, just
relying on the fact that you're going to go, Wow,
yeah it sounds like me and Bam, Now grophology works
(23:19):
and I can get you to give me all your money.
Now you don't have to go to a graphologist or
you know, or even listen to the intro to this
podcast to to have some introduction to the power of
the for effect um. And as we were chatting about this,
we kind of looked at at four different levels, Like
(23:39):
at the very bottom level, you have essentially horoscopes and
fortune cookies. And it's worth noting unfortune cookies that every time,
even though we know those are just coming from a
crate in the back of the Chinese restaurant, even though
we really don't attribute any literal significance to what's coming
out of the cookie, they still resonate of this because
(24:00):
we still, at least for a second, we just we
used to spend this belief just enough to engage in
a worldview where the future is more than mystery and chance. Right, yeah, absolutely, yeah,
I have to ask, what's your favorite fortune cookie you've
ever gotten? Um, years and years and years ago, I
got one that was said, one day you will write
a book. I was like, yeah, that's great, that's what
(24:21):
I want to do anyway, So, um so I kept
that on. It's like, now they predicted the age of
self publishing and then they were going to be right
about no matter who opened that cookie. That's true, but uh,
you know it, uh it was you know, even though
I knew it was a vague statement. It's kind of
like on some level, I took it as encouragement. Right, yeah, Oh,
I'm if I had gotten a fortune cookie that said
you will write a book, I would still have that
(24:42):
in my wallet and be like, Yep, I'm going to
be a writer someday. That's how important I am. Uh No,
my favorite fortune cookie I ever got was the one
that said constant grinding will wear the iron rod down
to a needle. Huh what does it mean? I'm not
quite sure. Like it's telling you not to file yourself
(25:03):
with the file you wear a mouth guard at night.
Because if I if I had gotten that one, I
would think, oh, well that was clearly forecasting that I
grind my teeth and would need to wear a night guard. Yeah,
well it could have been that. But look to it
and take that fortune if you still have it to
your dentist and say, look into it. I don't know.
My dentist is moderately humorless, but okay, yeah, so you have.
(25:24):
You have fortune cookies, which, like you point out, they're
especially funny because we give them the significance even though,
like let's say you're a person who believes in astrology,
the fortune cookie doesn't even aspire to the astrology level
because you know, they're all just pre printed ahead of
time and they're they're in a box. Yeah, so at
least the horoscope is the is the higher end of
(25:47):
this level because it's at least rooted in this system.
It's a system that doesn't have any validity to it.
But if you suspend disbelief or engage in a little
magical thinking, you can buy into the system and then
buy into the results of the system. Right, But that
was the first level. What's the next level? Then the
next level we think, Uh, then the next level we
(26:10):
think is, uh, the which X Men character are you?
And and not necessarily just the which X Men character,
but any of these various pseudo personality quizzes based in fiction. Uh,
that end up. You know, it seems like for a
while they were always rolling out on Facebook. Is like
every day it was a new one. And you take
this little, generally poorly executed quiz and generally with very
(26:33):
leading questions to determine which X Men character, which Twilight
character are you? Which which house and Harry Potter would
you be in? That's right? I am gambit, Yeah, yeah,
And it would have questions like what would be your
preferred weapon in a fight at Amantium clause or exploding
playing cards, and that's just cheating because then the person
(26:54):
is basically choosing which X Men character they want to
be and just picking. Yeah. I think one of the
problems was there ended up being websites where you could
build your own, so people would just build them without
any any thought into what makes you know, makes it
seem like they work the better ones, and I think
the ones that were not user generated tended to feel
a little more like a personality test and it should
(27:16):
be a surprise when it tells you that you are
jug or not. And from from there we get into
the next level, which, of course the PSITE involves psychic
readings cold readings, where there's an actual intellect on the
other side of the test, drawing you in, conning you
with that, you know, with that with that little bit
of generally appliable UH data, and then making more specific
(27:40):
UH revelations visible about your your personal history and your
future and uh your departed loved ones in the afterlife. Yeah. There,
it's interactive and it's smart. The person knows what they're
doing and they're working you, you know, it's not just
like a kind of blank dumb statement that you have
to read into. They're helping you read into it actively.
(28:03):
And then, of course, in the level beyond that, you
have the quote professional personality test. This is, of course,
like Myers Briggs, the kind of test that a professional
might come into your workplace and actually administer the test
to everyone. Yeah, and we're certainly not saying that all
professionally administered psychological tests are bunk, that that's not the case.
(28:24):
What we are saying is that it's very possible for
a psychologist to design a personality assessment that is bunk
and you might very well not know it right. And
you know, I would go even even further and say
that I believe that people can use the cold reading
techniques and psychic reading techniques for an overall positive experience
(28:46):
with a person. But it kind of comes down to
that the question. You know, it's like, if you let
somebody go through the drawers in your house, are you
going to trust them not to steal your civil way? Right?
So that I'm positive their individuals, I know, their individuals
who have had the experience with psych kicks and UH
and cold readers and individuals using this technique where they
at least feel that there is some sort of temporary,
(29:07):
at least positive result from the experience. Oh yeah, Well,
as I said earlier in this episode, despite the fact
that I'm aware of it and I'm gonna try to
be cautious about it, I think I'm very susceptible to this.
I think I could easily naturally be the kind of
person that falls for it. If you tell me, at
times you experience social anxiety, but also you're an independent thinker,
(29:29):
I'm like, yeah, yeah, you know that is me. So
here's a big here's a big question that emerges. Are
there ways to make generic assessments feel more accurate to people,
to make sure that they're not instantating called out for
for the kind of generalities that that are that are
hallmark of this kind of manipulation. Yeah, I think the
(29:52):
first number one key principle is keep the descriptions as
vague and generally applicable as possible without it being too
obvious that they're meaningless. And this is a fine line
that that you have to walk with language if you're
going to try to be a deceptive no good diagnostician. Um,
so you wouldn't say, for example, you are an extrovert
(30:14):
or an introvert. I mean, obviously you're one of the two, right,
But you can say that without it being so clear.
I think it needs a little careful use of language.
So you would try something like you're often able to
find fulfillment in social events and relationships, but at times
you feel like you need to be by yourself. Now,
another possibility here comes to mind with the with the psychic,
(30:36):
we're talking like, if the psychic were to say there's
somebody in the room here who knew an old person
who died, like that sounds just really fake. But if
you were to phrase it more like somebody here lost
an individual, they were really just a strong presence in
their life. They were a real, you know, a personal hero,
kind of a mentor a rock for you. Yeah, like
(30:57):
you you change the way you're described, and you change
the thing a job of it and uh, and then
you might think, yeah, well, you know, my uncle Ben
was kind of like that without it just being like,
who's an old person I know that died. Oh, I
can choose from six, you know, but it's still general
enough that you could you can just throw that out
there and see what you catch. Yeah, you're you're creating
the illusion that you're narrowing the scope without really narrowing
(31:20):
it by much. So choose your words carefully. In fact,
I wanted to highlight it's in the spirit of one
of my favorite quotes from Calvin and Hobbes, which is
when Calvin's he's talking about how he used to hate
writing assignments for school, but then he decides he loves
them because he says, quote, the purpose of writing is
to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity.
(31:43):
That's kind of true. So there are some specific words
that will be very useful to you, useful modifiers like some.
Isn't that a great word because some could mean anything
from one percent to it includes all options except none
or all. Yeah, it's like saying, if you were to
say you're a real dirt bag, you're like, I don't
(32:06):
know if the psychic really knows me. Sometimes you're a
real dirt bag, and then you think, well, maybe I am.
You know, whether you're mostly a dirt bag or only
occasionally a dirt bag. That's true. Yeah, there's gotta be
at least some moment in your personal history where you're like,
I was kind of sliding towards the dirt bag level
of the stem on that one. Yeah, so that sometimes
some and then at times that's a great one because
(32:28):
at times that that sounds like psychological test language. At
the same time, you want to convince the mark here
that the Barnum profile is unique, right, And this was
key in Ford's experiment. Um uh. And he actually described
the following scene after he had collected feedback on the test.
He said he was going to read a list of
(32:49):
selected traits out loud, and if the students had the
trade on their profile, they needed to raise their hand.
After four read the first trade, every hand in the
room went up, and then the students burst out laugh thing.
The moment the students realized their profiles were not unique,
that's when they instantly knew the personality sketch was bunk. Right.
So in this we get into the whole fortune cookie scenario, Like,
(33:09):
if you know all the fortune cookies are the same,
the only way you're gonna get into it is if
you suspend disbelief or even just you know, it's hard
to even have the magical thinking cranked up high enough
to buy a fortune cookie. It's amazing how much that works.
I mean, even knowing what we know about fortune cookies,
not thinking they're magical. Imagine if you were sitting at
a table and everybody opened their fortune cookie at the
(33:32):
Chinese restaurant and they all had the same fortune on them, Like,
it wouldn't even feel as significant to you as it
normally does when you normally know it's not significant, right,
but if you have the at least the illusion that
has been personally prepared for you, like nobody does this.
But what if the fortune cookie chef came to your
table as if they were going to you know, customer, Yeah,
(33:52):
and you know, did some sort of you know, I
don't know, some sort of ritual, right, or you know,
did something scanned with some sort of device and then
read it out on a meter and then wrote it down.
You know, if you had tune preparation side fortune cookie preparation,
this could be big. This would allow you to to
perceive it as an individualized exercise and then you would say,
(34:14):
of course you would buy it, even if it's like
one of those really horrible fortune cookies that just throws
out some little adage rather than even attempting to to
forecast your future Yeah, so here's another one, be flattering,
flatter the person. One of the findings of a nineteen
literature review by Dixon and Kelly was that there's some
(34:35):
evidence that positive or favorable assessments are more readily accepted
as accurate. So if you're reading a list of traits
that are your feedback from the personality test you took,
if they're mostly negative, you're less likely to say this
is very accurate. Then if they're mostly positive, and it
doesn't have to mean that they're all positive. In fact,
(34:55):
I would think that might not work if they're all
just glowing reviews of you. So what I would do
if I was designing one of these is make it
eighty to nine percent really nice things about you and
then a couple of harmless criticisms. Yeah, you want to
have it. You know. It's kind of like buying a
character in fiction, right. They need to have some flaws,
they need to have some some some strengths. You need
(35:17):
to be able to get behind the the idea that's
a real person, but they have to be overall likable
or nobody's going to buy them as the protagonist. Well,
I don't know if that's true for fiction. Because well,
who doesn't love Snake Pliskin. He has positive attributes. You know,
he's he stands up for what he believes in. He's
true to himself. Yeah, and you know he's uh, he's
(35:39):
he's also true to his crew. That's important too. You know,
like when he gets out and he finally talks to
the president, you know, the first thing he says is, like,
these people, well, some of these people died for you.
You know, you gotta gotta stand by them. In the
presidents too busy prepping, and that's where he decides to
tear up the tape. So yeah, yeah, yeah, but but yeah,
when a character is just too unlikable, stintly comes to mind.
(36:01):
That show Last minut on Earth. I don't know if
you watched this Will Forte in the league playing the
this uh this man who survived after the apocalypse, and
it's and then he starts encountering random survivors. But he's
the center of it, and it's a good show. But
the character is so unlikable that I ended one of
(36:22):
the last episode I watched. I think I spent the
whole thing just hoping cannibal wanderers would show up and
eat him. Because it's like, I can't really get behind
him because he's so despicable. Oh man, I think of
this because just a couple of weeks ago, on July four,
we in our house watched Jaws, which we do everywhere
on July four. Yeah, but have you ever read the book? No,
(36:43):
I haven't. Every single character is detestable. There. There's not
a single even remotely likable character that I don't know.
I have no idea whether that was intentional or not.
But you just want the shark to eat them all weird,
and they had to change it for the movie. It's
to imagine that now with as like lovable as Quint
is in the movie. Yeah, that's weird. No I read.
(37:05):
I read Peter Benchley's Beast about the Giant Squid. But
that's the only Benchley book I've ever read. Yeah, I've
never ventured into the Benchley deep cuts. That's that's the
only cut I've listened to. But it was fun in
the day, somebody fights a giant squid of the chainsaw. Wait,
let's get back. Oh yeah, yeah, we have one more.
And this one is pretty simple project high status and
(37:28):
scientific authority. It kind of like, if you put this
in the guise of the psychic reader or the magician,
Like where a fancy cloak, have a cool beard, right, Like,
drape yourself in the authority of the station you're in.
And if you're trying to, uh to pull this off
as like a personality assessment thing, like, have some sort
of scientific authority to you throw out some scientific lingo,
(37:50):
have some sort of gadget that you will whip out
at your table side fortune cookie preparation, right. I I
actually tried to incorporate this into the little deception I
used at the beginning of the episode when I said
that the test we used was a survey created by
the Society for Personality and Social Psychology subdivision of the
A p A, which is a real subdivision. Don't know
if they've ever created a test, but if it sounded
(38:13):
accurate because you're throwing out some some some jargon, throwing
out the name of an organization in your mind kind
of stops listening and just sort of checks it off, like, yeah,
that sounds that sounds accurate. Yeah. Now, there of course
a number of positives here. As we was, we touched
on you know, you can have fun with a fortune cookie.
You can enjoy your horoscope. You can. People love these
online personality quizzes. Yeah, you can appreciate the you know,
(38:35):
some sort of personal satisfaction in finding out that you're
Wolverine um. And in some cases I maintain you can
you know, and the right kind of psychic can can
get inside your head a little bit and have a
positive effect on you. I mean you could argue that
to a certain experient therapists. You're using the same the
same devices, they're just using it with some sort of
(38:56):
ethical um structure employe. Oh yeah, this is a thing
that is I've read pointed out about some psychics before,
like it doesn't have to be true that they have
psychic powers, like the paranormal doesn't have to exist for
them to perhaps have insights that are useful to you.
So there's an actually a really good article on this,
and I'll link to this in the landing page for
this episode. Susan Krauss a Whitburn's when it comes to
(39:19):
personality test, a dose of skepticism is a good thing.
And this is from Psychology Today, and she presents first
of all, the dark side of the for effect um
as as really coming down the key three key at things. One,
it allows others to scam you out of money, right
because because of that thing for mentioned where if if
it works on you once, now you have logged in
your brain. Okay, this device is worth trusting. And that
(39:43):
device could be a particular test, could be the apology,
could be a psychic on TV, could be an advertising
um slogan, you know, like, oh, they really kind of
got into who I am. They know who I am,
I should buy this champoo. Um. Number two, it makes
you more susceptible to bad advice. You kind of touched
them that already, but yeah, they're they're they're in your head.
(40:05):
You're you're trusting them, and now they can start telling
you all sorts of horrible things. And then the number three,
it makes you less susceptible to good advice that isn't
as lubricated. Oh man, So if somebody so, let's say
you take a very well designed psychology test that gives
you a good profile of your personality that has all
kinds of specifics that aren't as well packaged as these
(40:27):
vague generalities you would get in another test, you might
actually not trust the good feedback. Yeah, or imagine the
pyramid scheme guy. You know, like he's coming up, he's
buying your drinks. He's really laying it on thick. You're
really buying into what he's selling because he's selling it
so well, and he's he's already gained your trust. Meanwhile,
your actual accountant is saying, hey, you really need to
(40:47):
be careful about these investments. But your actual accountants kind
of boring and you can make yourself and he doesn't.
His information isn't as well lubricated as that of the charlatan.
So she has for key recommendations to avoid the pitfalls,
just to you know, just to keep it in your
mind as you're moving through life. Number one, No a
(41:08):
fortune cookie when you see one. Obviously that's that's my
summation of this particular one. But yeah, like you know
what you're dealing with. Yeah, beyond the lookout for statements
they're universally valid and recognize them as such. Right, Yeah,
that's the second way you look for evidence of validity.
Read between the lines, look for that ambiguity we've been
talking about. Is this a statement that could apply to anyone?
(41:29):
And I'm just grabbing onto the bait. And then finally
trust actual professionals as opposed to advertisements and TV psychics? No, no, no,
wait no, maybe you haven't encountered my favorite TV psychic. Uh,
doctor you're so great? Now, Doctor you're so great, has
some really interesting things to say about how smart I am. Yeah, yeah,
(41:52):
doctor you're so Yeah. Well they can they can be
very convincing. I you know, I don't watch as much
TV these days, and out, like you know, the old days,
you turn on the TV and you just had to
absorb what it gave you. So I don't even know
what's out there. Are there other YouTube psychics the way
there used to be TV psychics? I would hope so.
But like, there was the guy with the gray plastic hair.
Do you remember him? No? What is that? Oh goodness,
(42:15):
I should have. I should have thought to look him
up before the podcast episode. But he had it was
like this just normal looking, kind of doughey dude, and
he had hair that was singingly made out of plastic.
I just googled psychic gray plastic hair and the first
result is Dorian gray syndrome. M Well, now I'm even
more intrigued as that he may have This man may
(42:36):
have suffered from some sort of disorder than involved in
aging painting. But but certainly there was just a whole
world's gallery of TV psychics back in the day. Certainly,
but you know they're each unique one and all. Yeah. Um,
but again there's still the other positive side to this
is that allows us to really get into our music, right.
Oh yeah, of course. We were talking about this the
(42:57):
other day with the the general miracle themes of pop music,
and I was thinking about this in contrast to the
way you handle specificity versus generality and fiction. If you're
writing a short story or novel or something like that,
you don't want to sketch characters in a general way.
You want to sketch them in a specific way, to
(43:17):
have interesting, unique details that make them who they are.
For some reason, in fiction we connect better with specifically
drawn characters. But in pop music, very often, if you
look at the lyrics, they are utterly devoid of specifics.
They are they're they're doing this game where you paint
in extremely vague generalities that could apply to almost any
(43:39):
person at any time, and people do seem to respond
to that. Yeah, because often the generalities are you know,
kind of mantras that you can get behind, Uh, you know,
statements of power like like I remember, like when I
would listen to like Nine Nails in high school, there
would be you know, it seems like in more than
one song you would throw in that line nothing could
stopped me now, you know, and kind of a you know,
(44:00):
dark Gothy Nine Nails la. But you listen to me like, yeah,
nothing can stop me now you kind of pumping yourself
up with it. This is about my life, yeah, because
I am facing a challenge that I should not be
stopped from. How did he know so much about me?
Trent just knows. Trent Trent is a man of insight. Um. Likewise,
another one for me several years back, like a definite
(44:21):
pop example, the band LaRue had a track Bulletproof, where
the chorus was next time baby, I'll be bulletproof. And
I don't know what's even possibly specifically about, but even
you know, I would listen to and it was a
catchy tune and I would think, Yeah, I'm gonna be bulletproof.
You can't stop me? Yeah, the same kind of it's
the same. Yeah, it's the Trent principle, the tread principle.
(44:41):
How about yourself? Any pop songs that resonate with you. Yeah,
just looking back in my history in my music player app.
I think it's funny looking at the contrast between different
types of lyrics. Like one of the things I see
is Lauretta Lens don't come home a drinking with Loving
on your mind, which I mean that's a pretty specific song,
(45:02):
like that tells a specific story. On the other hand,
you've got don't stop thinking about Tomorrow. Yeah, I mean
that's how much more general could it be? You could
be like, wow, they really, they really got me because
I'm thinking about the weekend or that you know, I'm
going to get something done tomorrow. The mac knows, the
mac knows how we think, right, and of course that
(45:22):
that that does underlign like the two big trends in
song like you have those those ultra specific songs or
even narrative songs. Yeah, Like I'm thinking like Gordon Lightfoot
type of vibe where you're telling a very definite story
about a particular scenario and with its own ups and downs.
And then on the other side, don't stop thinking about tomorrow.
The generic anthems that you can just copy and paste
(45:43):
your life onto. Indeed, the classification of anthems is key alright, Sody,
you have it, the for effect, the Barnum effect, whatever
you want to call it, it's all around us. It's
it's in our it's in our religious lives, it's in
our secular lives. It's in our advertising, it's in uh,
it's in our our culinary taste. So we know that
(46:05):
everyone has has something to share on this particular topic.
So we'd love to hear from you. In the meantime,
check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That
is the mothership. That's where you'll find all the episodes.
You'll find blog post videos, you'll find links out to
our social media account. We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.
And if you want to let us know how you
reacted initially to our story about the audience survey, or
(46:26):
if you want to tell us a story you have
about somebody falling for the horror effect or the Barnum effect,
you can let us know at blow the Mind at
how stuff works dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com
Welcome to stuff to Blow Your Mind from how stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
today we're gonna be talking about the science of personality assessments.
Uh and full disclosure, we wanted to let you know
(00:24):
that the reason we thought to do this topic today
was that How Stuff Works actually hired an audience research
firm to study our podcast audiences through surveys and statistical profiling. Yeah,
so if you took that survey that we put up
on Facebook, that's what that was all about. Yeah, unless
you think that this was just out of curiosity, you
(00:44):
should always keep in mind that marketers and advertisers want
to know everything about you, not because you're so interesting,
but because it helps them sell you snack boxes and underwear. Yes,
but anyway, they offered a personalized psychometric inventory for each
of the individual podcast audiences, so each podcast got their
own and it was based on a test originally compiled
(01:07):
by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology subdivision of
the a p A. And I thought this was really cool,
Like they came up with a psychological profile. It was
basically a personality sketch that listed key personality traits that
were characteristics unique to each podcast audience. And so I
picked like five of the traits they listed as unique
(01:29):
to the archetypical stuff to blow your mind listener. So
I thought you guys might be interested in this. Yeah, yeah,
let's roll these out and then as we do, you
can just think, well, to think yourself. Does that jive
with my outlook on life and how I view myself? Yeah,
so here we go. Number One, you tend to be
independent thinkers, hesitant to accept the statements of others without
(01:50):
adequate proof. Number two, you prefer a certain amount of
change and variety and become dissatisfied when himmed in by
restrictions and limitations. Three at times, you experience varying degrees
of social anxiety. Number four, you were motivated by a
strong desire for fairness and reciprocity in social situations. Five
at times, you have serious doubts as to whether you've
(02:12):
made the right decision or done the right thing. So,
before we get into the meat of today's episode, I
just wanted to mention that if you're a regular listener
and you want to let us know how accurately this
profile describes you. You can email us at blow the
Mind at how stuff works dot com and give us
feedback on on the sketch. And unfortunately, everything I just
(02:33):
said was made up. Yes, yes, this is a little
slice of fiction, a slice of necessary fiction to get
into our topic today. Yeah. So there was no audience survey,
no survey data. We just threw together that sketch from
a few pre existing generic descriptions. Hopefully nobody is upset
about it, but if you are, you can contact how
(02:53):
Stuff Works chief legal consultant Richard W. Glazer. That's right. Uh,
but be honest, now, were you thinking for a second, Yeah,
that sounds like me, I have to admit, when I've
read through them, even knowing that that we have just
made this up, I was thinking, Yeah, that's how I
view it. As a co host of the show. Yeah,
I am completely susceptible to this effect we're going to
(03:14):
talk about today. I think if I had been in
the audience's position here, I would have been like, Yep,
that describes me. I think, at least in the kind
of egotistical, self absorbed, self congratulatory way. We sometimes I'll
tend to be. I'm sure that I tend to be
on the inside. Uh. If you weren't convinced, congratulations for
being a skeptical no at all. But if you were convinced,
(03:37):
don't feel ashamed because you just displayed susceptibility to an
effect that shows up in most humans, no matter how
smart we are, and this is known as the former
effect fo r e er or the Barnum effect. Both
names refer to the exact same thing, and we'll probably
use the terms interchangeably today, but mainly we're gonna use
(03:57):
Barnum effect in the podcast because that's easier to say
out loud. So the Barnum version of the name comes
from the Circus Kingpin P. T. Barnum, and I'm thinking
it could be ascribed to two different quotes attributed to Barnum,
either that there's a sucker born every minute, which apparently
he did not actually say, or that Barnum had something
(04:21):
for everybody, and I think that latter one might be
what's key here. And if he didn't have something for everybody,
he wanted to sell a product, right, the circus product
is intended for a wide audience, and he wants to
draw in as many people's possible. Yeah, he's gotta he's
got to push those jugglers, you know. But the Forwer
title comes from the American psychologist Bertram Our Forwer, and
(04:45):
he noticed this effect in a classic paper he published
in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in nineteen
forty nine. And this paper was called the Fallacy of
Personal Validation, A classroom demonstration of gullibility. Now, to give
you a little background on four Bertram R. Four He
was born in nineteen fourteen died in two thousand, American psychologist,
(05:08):
again famous for this personality test and his students. But
he served as a psychologist and administrator in a military
hospital in France during the Second World War, and then
he worked in l a at a veteran's mental clinic.
And also he had a private practice in Malibu. Yeah,
so what did Forer test with his students. Fourer had
(05:31):
previously discussed with his students a sort of proto personality
quiz called the Diagnostic interest blank or d i B.
And this was a qualitatively evaluated test that he explained
in the following language. He said quote, the d I
B consists of a list of hobbies, reading materials, personal characteristics,
(05:52):
job duties, and secret hopes and ambitions of one's ideal person.
The test is interpreted qualitatively and personality dynamics are inferred
along line similar to projective tests. So this is a
it's supposed to be qualitatively evaluated by a perceptive and
trained professional, somebody who knows what they're doing. And some
(06:14):
of his students, when they heard about the test, asked
to take it. They wanted to take the d IB
and receive these tailored personality evaluations because you know, who
doesn't want to take a personality quiz and learn a
little bit about themselves? Right? I mean that's it just
speaks to our egos as well as you know, most
people's desires for self improvement. You know, we want to
(06:35):
we want we want to fill out that Dungeons and
Dragon's character sheet with our own attributes and figure out
what we need A tweak with a magical ring or two? Right?
I am chaotic neutral for real. So Fourer acquiesced to
their desire and a group of thirty nine students all
took the test and handed in their papers. And then
one week later Fourer met with the students again for
(06:56):
class and he handed back the individually tailored personalityty vignettes,
and each one was a list of thirteen perceived personality
attributes under the student's name, and the students were instructed
to keep the results private. That part was important because,
in fact, thirteen personality features listed on each student's paper
(07:16):
had nothing to do with what the students wrote on
their test. Uh In fact, they were all exactly the
same for each one of the thirty nine students. So
there were thirteen statements listed on each of these thirty
nine identical personality sketches, and we're gonna read through them
real quick. Number one, you have a great need for
other people to like and admire you. You have a
(07:38):
tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great
deal of unused capacity, which you have not turned your advantage.
While you have some personality weaknesses, you were 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
(07:58):
doubts as to whether you've made the right decision or
done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of
change in variety and become dissatisfied when himmed in by
restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker
and do not accept other statements without satisfactory proof. You
have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing
yourself to others. At times you were extroverted, affable, sociable,
(08:20):
while at other times you were introverted, wary, reserved. Some
of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. Security is
one of your major goals in life. So the brilliance
of these is that, like just going through them there,
knowing again that these are false, that these are just
you know, could be thrown out to anybody. I found
(08:41):
myself nodding my head and saying, yeah, I can, definitely
I can. If I don't buy that statement outright, I
can at least pick some data from my own personal
history that could support that theory. Yeah, and that is
exactly what the test ends up relying on. So for
reveals in a footnote of his pay or that quote,
these statements came largely from a new stand astrology book.
(09:05):
So he just found a horoscope and picked out random
statements that could apply to a capricorn a sagittarius, whoever
it is, and students were then asked to rate on
a scale of zero to five, with zero being poor
and five being perfect, the accuracy of the d I
B as a test, and then the accuracy of their
(09:27):
own individual sketch as a portrayal of their personality. And
then he also asked the students to go down the
list and mark each of the thirteen statements as true, false,
or question mark. Here were the results as rated by
the students. The d I B got only one three,
it got twenty five fours, and it got thirteen fives,
(09:49):
So thirteen students thought it was perfect, thought it was
really good, and one thought it was okay. So all
of the students but one gave the test a four
or five for accuracy. And then when it came to
the individual sketches, all but five students rated their sketch
of four or a five, So the students overwhelmingly thought
(10:13):
the test was pretty good, too perfect, And an interesting
thing for Or points out when comparing the student ratings
of the test and the sketch against their item by
item breakdown, is this quote for some individuals, the presence
of eight true statements among the thirteen was considered sufficient
evidence for acceptance of the sketch as perfect. M let
(10:37):
that sink in for a second, eight out of thirteen
is sixty two per cent. So for some students, even
with these extremely vague statements, just getting sixty two percent
right about them was enough for the test to count
as a perfect hit. Yeah, how does that? How does
(10:57):
that work? What's your definition of perfectnesses? Don't know? Well,
I think it comes down to something four explains in
his paper later about the discrepancy between our sort of
like qualitative or quantitative analysis of the results and then
the amount of confidence we're willing to attribute to a
diagnostic tool as a whole. But what happened here? I mean,
(11:18):
subsequent studies have repeatedly demonstrated the Barnum effect under various circumstances,
So it's pretty safe to assume that four students weren't
just particularly gullible. In Art Carroll's entry in the Skeptics Dictionary,
he claims, quote, the test has been repeated hundreds of
times with psychology students, and the average is still around
(11:39):
four point two out of five or eighty four percent accurate.
So why are we so eager to gobble up worthless
effectively random assessments of ourselves. Well as as we'll discuss
the you know, A lot of the answer lies in
the presentation. You know, where this test was was taken
(11:59):
and who has given it to them, and in the
language in which it was administered. Right, it's a psychology professor,
it's a you know, an authority figure administering this test
to the students in a classroom in a center of learning. Uh.
And it's wrapped in the expected psychological lingo. Yes, But
there's an even deeper issue going on with the nature
(12:21):
of these evaluations that makes them work. And it's based
on the interplay between two principles that four points out
in his paper. And Uh. He four is referring to
certain types of people like crystal gazers as one term
he uses. I think that means like somebody looking into
a crystal ball. He's talking about the psychics of his
day and and things like that. He says, they might
(12:42):
even unwittingly make use of these principles, but they are
making use of them. And the principles are universal validity
and personal validation. That his term is personal validation. But
today we might know this as subjective validation, and the
idea of universal validity is the it pretty much every
single psychological trait can be observed in some degree in everybody.
(13:09):
I mean, think about it like if I say, at
times you experience varying degrees of social anxiety. Yeah, that's
that's everybody. Yeah, yeah, with it with a few just
complete space aliens, you know, eliminated from the mix. Everybody
deals with some level of anxiety. Right, So another way
(13:30):
of thinking about this is casting a wide net. And
you can see a very similar parallel practice if you
watch a psychic a group of people doing a cold
reading on a crowd. So the psychic might stand up
in front of a crowd and say, okay, I'm getting
something from a spirit, a spirit of someone known to
someone in the room. It's an older person, an older
(13:50):
person named John or Jack. Does that mean anything to anyone?
Something something starting with John or Jack, something starting with
the letter J. And then one hand goes and an
uncle named Jefferson exactly, Yeah, oh man, my uncle Jehosaphat
And then uh, and then the psychic says, yes, that's right,
Jehosaphat or Jefferson is here with us. And now we
(14:12):
can talk to Jeffer Josa Fat And then the client
later says, Wow, the psychics somehow knew something about Jehosaphen,
when in fact the client has supplied the relevant specifics themselves.
The psychic was just trawling with a very large net.
It would be extremely weird if nobody in the room
(14:32):
knew of a deceased family member whose name started with Jay. Yeah. Yeah,
it's just the odds are with you that you're gonna
catch somebody with that very vague, very general bit of bait. Yeah.
But then the other principle is this principle of personal
or subjective validation. So how do you test the validity
of a diagnostic instrument, whether it's a horoscope or a
(14:55):
psychic or a supposedly professional and valid psychological personality test.
You probably don't want to test it by using it
on somebody and then saying how accurately did this describe you?
Because this is subject to what for would call the
fallacy of personal validation. Because you are you, and because
(15:15):
you know the story of your own life so well,
you can always find autobiographical hooks to hang almost any
statement on, especially vague and general statements. So we mentioned
the example a minute ago of social anxiety. Can you
ever think of an instance where social anxiety had a
meaningful role in your life? Yeah? Of course, Yeah, every day.
(15:41):
Even somebody who's not particularly anxious, who doesn't have many
problems with social anxiety, can think of an instance that
was meaningful to them. Yeah, at the very least they
were once children, and they had to within some point
in their life where they felt a little awkward. Yeah.
And so simply put, subjective validation is when you find
personal and unique accuracy in statements that could apply to
(16:02):
many or all people. Yeah. And part of this just
gets into our our our enormous capacity, uh, to place
ourselves in any story too, just the fact that we
are empathic organisms. Yeah, yeah, Um, we're always seeking meaning
that relates to us. This sort of ties into something
we talked about a while back in the Science of
Coincidence episode, where you know, we're pattern seeking creatures, and
(16:26):
we're constantly trying to find the pattern that means something
to me. Yeah, you know, you're talking about our ability
to even essentially put ourselves in the shoes of extreme cases. Um,
you know this This immediately makes me think of the
popularity of uh, you know, any kind of fiction that
deals with individuals with mental illness or in extreme cases, um,
(16:49):
serial murderers. You know, because if you have a well
executed serial killer story, um, you can still you still
end up investing yourself in that person on some level.
You end up empathizing with at least some aspect of
their you know, ultimately broken psyche. Right. Yeah, so if
you if you can connect with the serial killer's relationship
(17:11):
with his mother or something like that, you're like, oh, no,
is this really the story of me? Yeah, or like, uh,
I'm obviously thinking of Hannibal. Yeah, Hannibal actually came up
a couple of times in my mind. I'm looking through
the research here, Um, I think it was Joyce Carol
Oates has a book called Zombie that's essentially a retelling
(17:32):
of of the Jeffrey Dalmer uh case, but with you know,
fictionalized account and so even in this year, you're reading
in it and you can't actually empathize with the murderous
aspects of the main character. But ultimately it's about a
guy who feels lost in life and doesn't exactly know
where he fits, and you know, who can't empathize on
(17:54):
some level at some point in their their timeline with
an example like that, right, Yeah, in a way where
all that cannibal Yeah, it makes me wonder if you
if you administered a test like Forest test, and you
had all of the personality statements leaning more towards the
darker and the insane, like, what the acceptance level would be. Well,
(18:16):
there actually is some commentary on that in the literature,
and we can get to that in a bit. What
are some other studies that What have other studies revealed
about this, uh, this property? Well, there have been number one.
It's just been reproduced many many times. And the strength
of the effect varies when you change some of the
test conditions, and we can talk about that later, but
(18:36):
there's a pretty consistent result that the subjects of personality
assessments tend to rate assessments as highly accurate in a
way that's unique to them, even though the statements within
the assessment are vague in general, and sometimes even when
many of the individual statements in the list are subjectively
perceived as wrong by the client. Remember when we talked
(18:58):
about the people who got eight out of thirteen right,
said that the test described them perfectly. So what's the
impact of this in practice. Well, one of the things
that Forror was personally worried about was that this could
be used to validate or prop up the accuracy of
(19:19):
very bad tools. So let's say you're an unscrupulous psychic
or an unscrupulous psychotherapist. You can potentially use a combination
of subjective validation and universal validity to get a very
unhealthy amount of leverage over another person's common sense, and
the exchange might go something like this. The psychic or
(19:41):
unscrupulous psychologist makes a diagnosis of a person's personality, taking
advantage of these, you know, very vague general traits and
then leaning on the client's tendency towards subjective validation of
the test. The client reads these things like in the
test we talked about and says, yep, that's me, and
then assumes that the psychic or the unscrupulous psychologist has
(20:04):
access to powerful and accurate skills or diagnostic tools. Then
the psychic or unscrupulous psychologist makes bolder, more specific, less
credible diagnoses or or predictions that might not have been
accepted on the first go round. But at this point
the client thinks, well, he knew what he was talking
about the last time, so he must know this time.
(20:25):
I'm going to listen to him. Yeah, I mean it's
kind of a confidence trick, right, I mean, it's a
it's it's a matter of producing this sort of magical trick,
this illusion that proves to the patient or the the mark,
or however you want to want to look at them,
the customer, proves to them that you have insight into
who they are and what they're all about. And then
(20:47):
when they start making comments that that don't jive as well,
we just attribute it to their they know more about
us than we know about us. Yeah, I remember when
I was right last time. It's also very similar to
the con maneuver. If you're trying to con somebody out
of a large amount of money, say like, hey, invest
in my pyramid scheme. It'll you know, I can give
(21:07):
give you a million dollars. First you ask for a
very small investment, and then you pay out what you
promised on that small investment, and then they say, wow, okay,
well it seems to work. And so then when you
ask for a bigger investment, you can fly off to
Hawaii with the money you probably wouldn't fly to Hawaii?
Where would you fly to Cayman Islands or the Far
East I'm thinking, or the halls of Dagon. Yeah, always
(21:30):
a good place that it's tough to get the currency
exchanged properly there, but still still a good place. A
lot of hanging out in the depths, right, And this
can be applied to more different types of diagnostic tools
and instruments than you might think. I mean, so the
obvious ones we've talked about are like the personal powers
of a person who claims to be a psychic, or
(21:51):
a certain type of psychological test, any one of these
personality tests you can take. But other things might be
methods of discerning personality, These like graphology. Have you ever
heard about graphology? Not until preparing this episode now yes.
So So four claimed that he was prompted to perform
this experiment after he was accosted in a nightclub by
(22:13):
a graphologist. And a graphologist as a person who believes
they can tell you all about your personality by looking
at your handwriting. You know, this makes me think that
this nightclub was either really cool or are really lame,
Like there's no in between there If it involves being
approached by a grapholo. It sounds pretty cool to me.
I never get approached by graphologists when I'm out having
(22:35):
a you know, at a bar or somewhere. I wish
I would be, because that would be really interesting. But yeah,
so graphology is widely considered a baseless pseudoscience, though I'm
sure some people still believe in it, and that's kind
of scary. But four wanted to demonstrate that he could,
with deliberately faulty techniques, produce assessments that clients would find
(22:55):
just as accurate as those provided by a professional graphologist.
So repeat the same pattern I talked about a minute
ago with the with the psychic or the unscrupulous psychologist,
where they proved themselves and the and the accuracy of
their diagnostic tools with some very general, vague statements, just
relying on the fact that you're going to go, Wow,
yeah it sounds like me and Bam, Now grophology works
(23:19):
and I can get you to give me all your money.
Now you don't have to go to a graphologist or
you know, or even listen to the intro to this
podcast to to have some introduction to the power of
the for effect um. And as we were chatting about this,
we kind of looked at at four different levels, Like
(23:39):
at the very bottom level, you have essentially horoscopes and
fortune cookies. And it's worth noting unfortune cookies that every time,
even though we know those are just coming from a
crate in the back of the Chinese restaurant, even though
we really don't attribute any literal significance to what's coming
out of the cookie, they still resonate of this because
(24:00):
we still, at least for a second, we just we
used to spend this belief just enough to engage in
a worldview where the future is more than mystery and chance. Right, yeah, absolutely, yeah,
I have to ask, what's your favorite fortune cookie you've
ever gotten? Um, years and years and years ago, I
got one that was said, one day you will write
a book. I was like, yeah, that's great, that's what
(24:21):
I want to do anyway, So, um so I kept
that on. It's like, now they predicted the age of
self publishing and then they were going to be right
about no matter who opened that cookie. That's true, but uh,
you know it, uh it was you know, even though
I knew it was a vague statement. It's kind of
like on some level, I took it as encouragement. Right, yeah, Oh,
I'm if I had gotten a fortune cookie that said
you will write a book, I would still have that
(24:42):
in my wallet and be like, Yep, I'm going to
be a writer someday. That's how important I am. Uh No,
my favorite fortune cookie I ever got was the one
that said constant grinding will wear the iron rod down
to a needle. Huh what does it mean? I'm not
quite sure. Like it's telling you not to file yourself
(25:03):
with the file you wear a mouth guard at night.
Because if I if I had gotten that one, I
would think, oh, well that was clearly forecasting that I
grind my teeth and would need to wear a night guard. Yeah,
well it could have been that. But look to it
and take that fortune if you still have it to
your dentist and say, look into it. I don't know.
My dentist is moderately humorless, but okay, yeah, so you have.
(25:24):
You have fortune cookies, which, like you point out, they're
especially funny because we give them the significance even though,
like let's say you're a person who believes in astrology,
the fortune cookie doesn't even aspire to the astrology level
because you know, they're all just pre printed ahead of
time and they're they're in a box. Yeah, so at
least the horoscope is the is the higher end of
(25:47):
this level because it's at least rooted in this system.
It's a system that doesn't have any validity to it.
But if you suspend disbelief or engage in a little
magical thinking, you can buy into the system and then
buy into the results of the system. Right, But that
was the first level. What's the next level? Then the
next level we think, Uh, then the next level we
(26:10):
think is, uh, the which X Men character are you?
And and not necessarily just the which X Men character,
but any of these various pseudo personality quizzes based in fiction. Uh,
that end up. You know, it seems like for a
while they were always rolling out on Facebook. Is like
every day it was a new one. And you take
this little, generally poorly executed quiz and generally with very
(26:33):
leading questions to determine which X Men character, which Twilight
character are you? Which which house and Harry Potter would
you be in? That's right? I am gambit, Yeah, yeah,
And it would have questions like what would be your
preferred weapon in a fight at Amantium clause or exploding
playing cards, and that's just cheating because then the person
(26:54):
is basically choosing which X Men character they want to
be and just picking. Yeah. I think one of the
problems was there ended up being websites where you could
build your own, so people would just build them without
any any thought into what makes you know, makes it
seem like they work the better ones, and I think
the ones that were not user generated tended to feel
a little more like a personality test and it should
(27:16):
be a surprise when it tells you that you are
jug or not. And from from there we get into
the next level, which, of course the PSITE involves psychic
readings cold readings, where there's an actual intellect on the
other side of the test, drawing you in, conning you
with that, you know, with that with that little bit
of generally appliable UH data, and then making more specific
(27:40):
UH revelations visible about your your personal history and your
future and uh your departed loved ones in the afterlife. Yeah. There,
it's interactive and it's smart. The person knows what they're
doing and they're working you, you know, it's not just
like a kind of blank dumb statement that you have
to read into. They're helping you read into it actively.
(28:03):
And then, of course, in the level beyond that, you
have the quote professional personality test. This is, of course,
like Myers Briggs, the kind of test that a professional
might come into your workplace and actually administer the test
to everyone. Yeah, and we're certainly not saying that all
professionally administered psychological tests are bunk, that that's not the case.
(28:24):
What we are saying is that it's very possible for
a psychologist to design a personality assessment that is bunk
and you might very well not know it right. And
you know, I would go even even further and say
that I believe that people can use the cold reading
techniques and psychic reading techniques for an overall positive experience
(28:46):
with a person. But it kind of comes down to
that the question. You know, it's like, if you let
somebody go through the drawers in your house, are you
going to trust them not to steal your civil way? Right?
So that I'm positive their individuals, I know, their individuals
who have had the experience with psych kicks and UH
and cold readers and individuals using this technique where they
at least feel that there is some sort of temporary,
(29:07):
at least positive result from the experience. Oh yeah, Well,
as I said earlier in this episode, despite the fact
that I'm aware of it and I'm gonna try to
be cautious about it, I think I'm very susceptible to this.
I think I could easily naturally be the kind of
person that falls for it. If you tell me, at
times you experience social anxiety, but also you're an independent thinker,
(29:29):
I'm like, yeah, yeah, you know that is me. So
here's a big here's a big question that emerges. Are
there ways to make generic assessments feel more accurate to people,
to make sure that they're not instantating called out for
for the kind of generalities that that are that are
hallmark of this kind of manipulation. Yeah, I think the
(29:52):
first number one key principle is keep the descriptions as
vague and generally applicable as possible without it being too
obvious that they're meaningless. And this is a fine line
that that you have to walk with language if you're
going to try to be a deceptive no good diagnostician. Um,
so you wouldn't say, for example, you are an extrovert
(30:14):
or an introvert. I mean, obviously you're one of the two, right,
But you can say that without it being so clear.
I think it needs a little careful use of language.
So you would try something like you're often able to
find fulfillment in social events and relationships, but at times
you feel like you need to be by yourself. Now,
another possibility here comes to mind with the with the psychic,
(30:36):
we're talking like, if the psychic were to say there's
somebody in the room here who knew an old person
who died, like that sounds just really fake. But if
you were to phrase it more like somebody here lost
an individual, they were really just a strong presence in
their life. They were a real, you know, a personal hero,
kind of a mentor a rock for you. Yeah, like
(30:57):
you you change the way you're described, and you change
the thing a job of it and uh, and then
you might think, yeah, well, you know, my uncle Ben
was kind of like that without it just being like,
who's an old person I know that died. Oh, I
can choose from six, you know, but it's still general
enough that you could you can just throw that out
there and see what you catch. Yeah, you're you're creating
the illusion that you're narrowing the scope without really narrowing
(31:20):
it by much. So choose your words carefully. In fact,
I wanted to highlight it's in the spirit of one
of my favorite quotes from Calvin and Hobbes, which is
when Calvin's he's talking about how he used to hate
writing assignments for school, but then he decides he loves
them because he says, quote, the purpose of writing is
to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity.
(31:43):
That's kind of true. So there are some specific words
that will be very useful to you, useful modifiers like some.
Isn't that a great word because some could mean anything
from one percent to it includes all options except none
or all. Yeah, it's like saying, if you were to
say you're a real dirt bag, you're like, I don't
(32:06):
know if the psychic really knows me. Sometimes you're a
real dirt bag, and then you think, well, maybe I am.
You know, whether you're mostly a dirt bag or only
occasionally a dirt bag. That's true. Yeah, there's gotta be
at least some moment in your personal history where you're like,
I was kind of sliding towards the dirt bag level
of the stem on that one. Yeah, so that sometimes
some and then at times that's a great one because
(32:28):
at times that that sounds like psychological test language. At
the same time, you want to convince the mark here
that the Barnum profile is unique, right, And this was
key in Ford's experiment. Um uh. And he actually described
the following scene after he had collected feedback on the test.
He said he was going to read a list of
(32:49):
selected traits out loud, and if the students had the
trade on their profile, they needed to raise their hand.
After four read the first trade, every hand in the
room went up, and then the students burst out laugh thing.
The moment the students realized their profiles were not unique,
that's when they instantly knew the personality sketch was bunk. Right.
So in this we get into the whole fortune cookie scenario, Like,
(33:09):
if you know all the fortune cookies are the same,
the only way you're gonna get into it is if
you suspend disbelief or even just you know, it's hard
to even have the magical thinking cranked up high enough
to buy a fortune cookie. It's amazing how much that works.
I mean, even knowing what we know about fortune cookies,
not thinking they're magical. Imagine if you were sitting at
a table and everybody opened their fortune cookie at the
(33:32):
Chinese restaurant and they all had the same fortune on them, Like,
it wouldn't even feel as significant to you as it
normally does when you normally know it's not significant, right,
but if you have the at least the illusion that
has been personally prepared for you, like nobody does this.
But what if the fortune cookie chef came to your
table as if they were going to you know, customer, Yeah,
(33:52):
and you know, did some sort of you know, I
don't know, some sort of ritual, right, or you know,
did something scanned with some sort of device and then
read it out on a meter and then wrote it down.
You know, if you had tune preparation side fortune cookie preparation,
this could be big. This would allow you to to
perceive it as an individualized exercise and then you would say,
(34:14):
of course you would buy it, even if it's like
one of those really horrible fortune cookies that just throws
out some little adage rather than even attempting to to
forecast your future Yeah, so here's another one, be flattering,
flatter the person. One of the findings of a nineteen
literature review by Dixon and Kelly was that there's some
(34:35):
evidence that positive or favorable assessments are more readily accepted
as accurate. So if you're reading a list of traits
that are your feedback from the personality test you took,
if they're mostly negative, you're less likely to say this
is very accurate. Then if they're mostly positive, and it
doesn't have to mean that they're all positive. In fact,
(34:55):
I would think that might not work if they're all
just glowing reviews of you. So what I would do
if I was designing one of these is make it
eighty to nine percent really nice things about you and
then a couple of harmless criticisms. Yeah, you want to
have it. You know. It's kind of like buying a
character in fiction, right. They need to have some flaws,
they need to have some some some strengths. You need
(35:17):
to be able to get behind the the idea that's
a real person, but they have to be overall likable
or nobody's going to buy them as the protagonist. Well,
I don't know if that's true for fiction. Because well,
who doesn't love Snake Pliskin. He has positive attributes. You know,
he's he stands up for what he believes in. He's
true to himself. Yeah, and you know he's uh, he's
(35:39):
he's also true to his crew. That's important too. You know,
like when he gets out and he finally talks to
the president, you know, the first thing he says is, like,
these people, well, some of these people died for you.
You know, you gotta gotta stand by them. In the
presidents too busy prepping, and that's where he decides to
tear up the tape. So yeah, yeah, yeah, but but yeah,
when a character is just too unlikable, stintly comes to mind.
(36:01):
That show Last minut on Earth. I don't know if
you watched this Will Forte in the league playing the
this uh this man who survived after the apocalypse, and
it's and then he starts encountering random survivors. But he's
the center of it, and it's a good show. But
the character is so unlikable that I ended one of
(36:22):
the last episode I watched. I think I spent the
whole thing just hoping cannibal wanderers would show up and
eat him. Because it's like, I can't really get behind
him because he's so despicable. Oh man, I think of
this because just a couple of weeks ago, on July four,
we in our house watched Jaws, which we do everywhere
on July four. Yeah, but have you ever read the book? No,
(36:43):
I haven't. Every single character is detestable. There. There's not
a single even remotely likable character that I don't know.
I have no idea whether that was intentional or not.
But you just want the shark to eat them all weird,
and they had to change it for the movie. It's
to imagine that now with as like lovable as Quint
is in the movie. Yeah, that's weird. No I read.
(37:05):
I read Peter Benchley's Beast about the Giant Squid. But
that's the only Benchley book I've ever read. Yeah, I've
never ventured into the Benchley deep cuts. That's that's the
only cut I've listened to. But it was fun in
the day, somebody fights a giant squid of the chainsaw. Wait,
let's get back. Oh yeah, yeah, we have one more.
And this one is pretty simple project high status and
(37:28):
scientific authority. It kind of like, if you put this
in the guise of the psychic reader or the magician,
Like where a fancy cloak, have a cool beard, right, Like,
drape yourself in the authority of the station you're in.
And if you're trying to, uh to pull this off
as like a personality assessment thing, like, have some sort
of scientific authority to you throw out some scientific lingo,
(37:50):
have some sort of gadget that you will whip out
at your table side fortune cookie preparation, right. I I
actually tried to incorporate this into the little deception I
used at the beginning of the episode when I said
that the test we used was a survey created by
the Society for Personality and Social Psychology subdivision of the
A p A, which is a real subdivision. Don't know
if they've ever created a test, but if it sounded
(38:13):
accurate because you're throwing out some some some jargon, throwing
out the name of an organization in your mind kind
of stops listening and just sort of checks it off, like, yeah,
that sounds that sounds accurate. Yeah. Now, there of course
a number of positives here. As we was, we touched
on you know, you can have fun with a fortune cookie.
You can enjoy your horoscope. You can. People love these
online personality quizzes. Yeah, you can appreciate the you know,
(38:35):
some sort of personal satisfaction in finding out that you're
Wolverine um. And in some cases I maintain you can
you know, and the right kind of psychic can can
get inside your head a little bit and have a
positive effect on you. I mean you could argue that
to a certain experient therapists. You're using the same the
same devices, they're just using it with some sort of
(38:56):
ethical um structure employe. Oh yeah, this is a thing
that is I've read pointed out about some psychics before,
like it doesn't have to be true that they have
psychic powers, like the paranormal doesn't have to exist for
them to perhaps have insights that are useful to you.
So there's an actually a really good article on this,
and I'll link to this in the landing page for
this episode. Susan Krauss a Whitburn's when it comes to
(39:19):
personality test, a dose of skepticism is a good thing.
And this is from Psychology Today, and she presents first
of all, the dark side of the for effect um
as as really coming down the key three key at things. One,
it allows others to scam you out of money, right
because because of that thing for mentioned where if if
it works on you once, now you have logged in
your brain. Okay, this device is worth trusting. And that
(39:43):
device could be a particular test, could be the apology,
could be a psychic on TV, could be an advertising
um slogan, you know, like, oh, they really kind of
got into who I am. They know who I am,
I should buy this champoo. Um. Number two, it makes
you more susceptible to bad advice. You kind of touched
them that already, but yeah, they're they're they're in your head.
(40:05):
You're you're trusting them, and now they can start telling
you all sorts of horrible things. And then the number three,
it makes you less susceptible to good advice that isn't
as lubricated. Oh man, So if somebody so, let's say
you take a very well designed psychology test that gives
you a good profile of your personality that has all
kinds of specifics that aren't as well packaged as these
(40:27):
vague generalities you would get in another test, you might
actually not trust the good feedback. Yeah, or imagine the
pyramid scheme guy. You know, like he's coming up, he's
buying your drinks. He's really laying it on thick. You're
really buying into what he's selling because he's selling it
so well, and he's he's already gained your trust. Meanwhile,
your actual accountant is saying, hey, you really need to
(40:47):
be careful about these investments. But your actual accountants kind
of boring and you can make yourself and he doesn't.
His information isn't as well lubricated as that of the charlatan.
So she has for key recommendations to avoid the pitfalls,
just to you know, just to keep it in your
mind as you're moving through life. Number one, No a
(41:08):
fortune cookie when you see one. Obviously that's that's my
summation of this particular one. But yeah, like you know
what you're dealing with. Yeah, beyond the lookout for statements
they're universally valid and recognize them as such. Right, Yeah,
that's the second way you look for evidence of validity.
Read between the lines, look for that ambiguity we've been
talking about. Is this a statement that could apply to anyone?
(41:29):
And I'm just grabbing onto the bait. And then finally
trust actual professionals as opposed to advertisements and TV psychics? No, no, no,
wait no, maybe you haven't encountered my favorite TV psychic. Uh,
doctor you're so great? Now, Doctor you're so great, has
some really interesting things to say about how smart I am. Yeah, yeah,
(41:52):
doctor you're so Yeah. Well they can they can be
very convincing. I you know, I don't watch as much
TV these days, and out, like you know, the old days,
you turn on the TV and you just had to
absorb what it gave you. So I don't even know
what's out there. Are there other YouTube psychics the way
there used to be TV psychics? I would hope so.
But like, there was the guy with the gray plastic hair.
Do you remember him? No? What is that? Oh goodness,
(42:15):
I should have. I should have thought to look him
up before the podcast episode. But he had it was
like this just normal looking, kind of doughey dude, and
he had hair that was singingly made out of plastic.
I just googled psychic gray plastic hair and the first
result is Dorian gray syndrome. M Well, now I'm even
more intrigued as that he may have This man may
(42:36):
have suffered from some sort of disorder than involved in
aging painting. But but certainly there was just a whole
world's gallery of TV psychics back in the day. Certainly,
but you know they're each unique one and all. Yeah. Um,
but again there's still the other positive side to this
is that allows us to really get into our music, right.
Oh yeah, of course. We were talking about this the
(42:57):
other day with the the general miracle themes of pop music,
and I was thinking about this in contrast to the
way you handle specificity versus generality and fiction. If you're
writing a short story or novel or something like that,
you don't want to sketch characters in a general way.
You want to sketch them in a specific way, to
(43:17):
have interesting, unique details that make them who they are.
For some reason, in fiction we connect better with specifically
drawn characters. But in pop music, very often, if you
look at the lyrics, they are utterly devoid of specifics.
They are they're they're doing this game where you paint
in extremely vague generalities that could apply to almost any
(43:39):
person at any time, and people do seem to respond
to that. Yeah, because often the generalities are you know,
kind of mantras that you can get behind, Uh, you know,
statements of power like like I remember, like when I
would listen to like Nine Nails in high school, there
would be you know, it seems like in more than
one song you would throw in that line nothing could
stopped me now, you know, and kind of a you know,
(44:00):
dark Gothy Nine Nails la. But you listen to me like, yeah,
nothing can stop me now you kind of pumping yourself
up with it. This is about my life, yeah, because
I am facing a challenge that I should not be
stopped from. How did he know so much about me?
Trent just knows. Trent Trent is a man of insight. Um. Likewise,
another one for me several years back, like a definite
(44:21):
pop example, the band LaRue had a track Bulletproof, where
the chorus was next time baby, I'll be bulletproof. And
I don't know what's even possibly specifically about, but even
you know, I would listen to and it was a
catchy tune and I would think, Yeah, I'm gonna be bulletproof.
You can't stop me? Yeah, the same kind of it's
the same. Yeah, it's the Trent principle, the tread principle.
(44:41):
How about yourself? Any pop songs that resonate with you. Yeah,
just looking back in my history in my music player app.
I think it's funny looking at the contrast between different
types of lyrics. Like one of the things I see
is Lauretta Lens don't come home a drinking with Loving
on your mind, which I mean that's a pretty specific song,
(45:02):
like that tells a specific story. On the other hand,
you've got don't stop thinking about Tomorrow. Yeah, I mean
that's how much more general could it be? You could
be like, wow, they really, they really got me because
I'm thinking about the weekend or that you know, I'm
going to get something done tomorrow. The mac knows, the
mac knows how we think, right, and of course that
(45:22):
that that does underlign like the two big trends in
song like you have those those ultra specific songs or
even narrative songs. Yeah, Like I'm thinking like Gordon Lightfoot
type of vibe where you're telling a very definite story
about a particular scenario and with its own ups and downs.
And then on the other side, don't stop thinking about tomorrow.
The generic anthems that you can just copy and paste
(45:43):
your life onto. Indeed, the classification of anthems is key alright, Sody,
you have it, the for effect, the Barnum effect, whatever
you want to call it, it's all around us. It's
it's in our it's in our religious lives, it's in
our secular lives. It's in our advertising, it's in uh,
it's in our our culinary taste. So we know that
(46:05):
everyone has has something to share on this particular topic.
So we'd love to hear from you. In the meantime,
check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That
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