December 30, 2017 • 48 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 classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the subtle forces of the Forer effect. (Originally published July 23, 2015)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we
are going down down into the vault to revisit an
episode from Days of Old. That's right, this uh, this week,
we have an episode that originally published July two thousand
and fifteen, and it has to do a little bit
with old P. T. Barnum, who's in the well sort
(00:26):
of in the news again because there's a movie out
about his life. Right. Oh, I didn't even know that.
What's the movie? The Greatest Showman? The Greatest Showman, The
Greatest Showman that's in the greatest show on Earth but
making it Showman? Who's in it? Hugh Jackman, Old Wolverine himself,
Nice Barnum with claws. I have no idea. It's a musical,
so I probably will never see it. But at any rate,
his name is back in the ether again, so we
(00:49):
thought it a good opportunity to bust this episode out again.
What do you think about all you're singing? Oh, I
think he's fine. It's not necessarily my thing. Did you
see him in Lama's Rob No, No, you didn't see it. No,
I've only heard like clips of him singing. I generally
prefer him to you know, to be killing people with
claws or or bawling, uh, you know, emotionally. Yeah, he's okay,
(01:11):
he's okay singing anyway. Uh So I had no idea
about that. But there's your tie in. That's why this
is airing now. So I hope you enjoyed this episode
on the horror Effect. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your
Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to
(01:36):
Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
and I'm Joe McCormick. In. Today we're gonna be talking
about the science of personality assessments. Uh and full disclosure.
We wanted to let you know 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 filing. Yeah, so you
(02:01):
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 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
(02:23):
individual podcast audiences, so each podcast got their own and
it was based on a test originally compiled 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 was basically a
personality sketch that listed key personality traits that were characteristics
(02:45):
unique to each podcast audience. And so I picked like
five of the traits they listed as unique 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 to yourself, does that jive
with my outlook on life and how I view myself? Yeah,
(03:06):
so here we go. Number One, you tend to be
independent thinkers, hesitant to accept the statements of others without
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
(03:28):
strong desire for fairness and reciprocity in social situations. Five.
At times, you have serious doubts as to whether you've
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
(03:49):
Mind at how stuff works dot com and give us
feedback on on the sketch. And unfortunately, everything I just
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
(04:11):
a few pre existing generic descriptions. Hopefully nobody's upset about it,
but if you are, you can contact how 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 had just
made this up, I was thinking, Yeah, that's how I
(04:32):
view it. As a co host of the show. Yeah,
I am completely susceptible to this effect we're going to
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 all
tend to be. I'm sure that I tend to be
(04:53):
on the inside. Uh. If you weren't convinced, congratulations for
being a skeptical no at all. But if you work
and vinced, 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.
(05:15):
Both names refer to the exact same thing, and we'll
probably use the terms interchangeably today, but mainly we're gonna
use 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
(05:35):
to Barnum either that there's a sucker born every minute,
which apparently he did not actually say, or that Barnum
had something 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
(05:57):
he wants to draw in as many people's poss Yeah,
he's got a he's got to push those jugglers, you know.
But the former title comes from the American psychologist Bertram R. Forwer,
and 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
(06:18):
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, again famous for this ninety personality test and
his students. But he served as a psychologist and administrator
(06:38):
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 forwer test with his students. Fourer had
previously discussed with his students a sort of proto personality
quiz called the diagnot a stick interest blank, or d
(07:02):
I B, and this was a qualitatively evaluated test that
he explained in the following language. He said quote. The
d IB consists of a list of hobbies, reading materials,
personal characteristics, job duties, and secret hopes and ambitions of
one's ideal person. The test is interpreted qualitatively and personality
(07:23):
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 of his students, when they heard about the test,
asked to take it. They wanted to take the d
IB and received these tailored personality evaluations because you know,
(07:47):
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 we want we want to fill out that Dungeons
and Dagens 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
(08:08):
four 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 class and he handed back the individually tailored
personality vignettes, and each one was a list of thirteen
perceived personality attributes under the student's name, and the students
(08:31):
were instructed to keep the results private. That part was
important because, in fact, thirteen personality features listed on each
student's paper 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
(08:52):
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 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
(09:13):
presented problems for you. Disciplined and self controlled outside, you
tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you
have serious doubts as to whether you've made the right
decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain
amount of change and 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.
(09:37):
You have found it unwise to be too frank in
revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable,
while at other times you 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
(09:59):
knowing a and these are false, that these are just
you know, could be thrown out to anybody. I found
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
(10:21):
reveals in a footnote of his paper that quote these
statements came largely from a new stand astrology book, So
he just found a horoscope and 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
(10:43):
and five being perfect, the accuracy of the d I
B as a test, and then the accuracy of their
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 a question mark. Here were the results, as rated
(11:04):
by the students. The d I B got only one three,
it got twenty five fours, and it got thirteen fives.
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
(11:25):
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
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
(11:45):
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
that sink in for a second, eight out of thirteen
is sixty two per cent. So for some students, even
(12:07):
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 does that work?
What's your definition of perfect in this? I don't know. Well,
I think it comes down to something four explains in
his paper later about the discrepancy between our sort of
(12:30):
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,
subsequent studies have repeatedly demonstrated the Barnum effect under various circumstances,
so it's pretty safe to assume that for students weren't
just particularly gullible. In Art Carroll's entry in the Skeptics Dictionary,
(12:55):
he claims, quote, the test has been repeated hundreds of
times with psychology students, and the average is still around
four point two out of five or eight accurate. So
why are we so eager to gobble up worthless effectively
random assessments of ourselves? Well as as we'll discuss the
(13:17):
you know, a lot of the answer lies in the presentation.
You know, where this test was was taken and who
was given it to them, and then the 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
(13:41):
there's an even deeper issue going on with the nature
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 arning about the psychics of his day,
(14:03):
and and things like that. He says, they might 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 that pretty much every single psychological
(14:26):
trait can be observed in some degree in everybody. 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,
(14:48):
eliminated from the mix. Everybody deals with some level of anxiety. Right.
So another way of thinking about this is casting a
wide net. And you can see a very similar parallel
practice if you watch a psychic front of 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
(15:09):
spirit of someone known to someone in the room, it's
an older person, an older 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 an uncle named Jefferson exactly, yeah,
oh man, my uncle Jehosaphat. And then uh. And then
(15:30):
the psychic says, yes, that's right, Jehosaphat or Jefferson is
here with us, and and now we can talk to
Jeffer Josaphat. And then the client later says, wow, the
psychic somehow knew something about Jehosaphen, when in fact the
client has supplied the relevant specifics themselves. The psychic was
(15:50):
just trawling with a very large net. It would be
extremely weird if nobody in the room knew of a
deceased family member whose name started with J. Yeah, to
the odds are with you that you're going to catch
somebody with that very vague, very general bit of bait. Yeah.
But then the other principle is this principle of personal
(16:10):
or subjective validation. So how do you test the validity
of a diagnostic instrument, whether it's a horoscope or a
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?
(16:31):
Because this is subject to what for would call the
fallacy of personal validation. Because you are you, and because
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
(16:54):
ever think of an instance where social anxiety had a
meaningful role in your life? Yeah? Of course, yeah, every day.
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 there had to have been some
(17:15):
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
many or all people. Yeah. And part of this just
gets into our our enormous capacity, uh to place ourselves
in any story too, just the fact that we are
(17:36):
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 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
(17:58):
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,
serial murderers. You know, because if you have a well
executed serial killer story, um, you can still you still
(18:20):
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 killers relationship
with his mother or something like that, you're like, oh, no,
is this really the story of me? Yeah? Or like, uh,
(18:42):
I'm obviously thinking of Hannibal. Yeah, Hannibal actually came up
a couple of times in my mind looking through the
research here. Um, I think it was Joyce Carol Oates
has a book called Zombie that's essentially a retelling of
of the Jeffrey dalmer Um case, but with a fictionalized account,
and so even in this year, you're reading in it
(19:03):
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 some level at
some point in their their timeline with an example like that, Right, Yeah,
in a way, we're all that cannibal. Yeah. It makes
(19:25):
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, there actually is some
commentary on that in the literature, and we can get
to that in a bit. What are some other studies
(19:46):
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 there's pretty consistent result that
the subjects of personality assessments tend to rate assessments as
(20:06):
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 about the people who got eight
out of thirteen right, said that the test described them perfectly.
(20:28):
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 very bad tools. So let's say you're
an unscrupulous psychic or an unscrupulous psychotherapist. You can potentially
(20:50):
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 unscrupulous psychologist makes a diagnosis of a
person's personality, taking advantage of these, you know, very vague
(21:11):
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 access to powerful and accurate skills or
diagnostic tools. Then the psychic or unscrupulous psychologist makes bolder,
(21:36):
more specific, less credible diagnoses or or predictions that might
not have been accepted on the first go around. But
at this point the client thinks, well, he knew what
he was talking about the last time, so he must
know this time. 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
(22:01):
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 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
(22:23):
con somebody out of a large amount of money, say like, hey,
invest in my pyramid scheme, it'll you know, I can
give 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
(22:45):
Hawaii with the money. You probably wouldn't fly to Hawaii.
Where would you fly to? Cayman Islands? Yeah? Or the
Far East I'm thinking? Or the halls of Deacon Yeah,
always a good place that it's tough to get the
currency exchanged properly there, but but still still a good place.
A lot of kind and hanging out in the tests, right,
And this can be applied to more different types of
diagnostic tools and instruments than you might think. I mean,
(23:07):
so the obvious ones we've talked about are like the
personal powers of a person who claims to be a psychic,
or a certain type of psychological test, any one of
these personality tests you can take. But other things might
be methods of discerning personalities like graphology. Have you ever
heard about graphology? Not until preparing this episode, now yes,
(23:29):
So so four claimed that he was prompted to perform
this experiment after he was accosted in a nightclub by
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 are are really lame?
(23:50):
Like there's no in between there. If it involves being
approached by a grapholow, it sounds pretty cool to me.
I never get approached by graphologists when I'm out having
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,
(24:13):
with deliberately faulty techniques produce assessments that clients would find
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
(24:36):
relying on the fact that you're going to go, Wow, yeah,
it sounds like me and Bam, Now grophology works 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
(25:00):
the four effect um. And as we were chatting about this,
we kind of looked at at four different levels, like
at the very bottom level, you have essentially horoscopes and
fortune cookies. And it's worth noting on fortune cookies that
every time, even though we know those are just coming
from a crate in the back of the Chinese restaurant,
(25:21):
even though we really don't attribute any literal significance to
what's coming out of the cookie, they still resonate with
us because we still, at least for a second, we
just we suspend this belief just enough to engage in
a worldview where the future is more than mystery and chance. Right, absolutely, Yeah,
I have to ask, what's your favorite fortune cookie you've
(25:43):
ever gotten? Um, Years and years and years ago, I
got one that was said one day you'll write a book.
I was like, yeah, that's great, that's what 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, um it was you know, even though I
knew it was a vague statement, it's kind of like,
(26:04):
on some level, I took it as encouragement, right, yeah, yeah,
Oh I'm if I had gotten a fortune cookie that
said you will write a book, I would still have
that 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?
(26:28):
I'm not quite sure. Like it's telling you not to
file yourself with the file you wear a mouth card
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 card. Yeah well it could have been that, but
look to it. Take that fortune if you still have
it to your dentist and say look into it, and
I don't know, my dentist is moderately humorless. But okay, yeah,
(26:52):
so you have 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
(27:15):
end of 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. But
that was the first level. What's the next level? Then
the next level we think, uh? Then the next level
(27:39):
we think is, uh, the which X men character are you?
And and not necessarily just the wich X men character,
but any of these various pseudo personality quizzes based in
fiction U that end up. You know, it seems like
for a while they were always rolling out on Facebook.
It is like every day it was a new one
and you take this little, generally poorly x acuted quiz
(28:01):
and generally with very 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 they 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
(28:21):
because then the person 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
(28:44):
and it should be a surprise when it tells you
that you are joke or not. And from from there
we get into the next level, which, of course site
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
(29:08):
more specific hum 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
(29:30):
into it actively. 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
(29:52):
not the case. 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
(30:13):
overall positive experience 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 silver?
Were right? So I'm positive they are individuals. I know
their individuals who have had the experience with psychics and
UH and cold readers, and individuals using this technique where
they at least feel that there is some sort of temporary,
(30:36):
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,
(30:58):
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 instantly being called
out for for the kind of generalities that that are
that are hallmark of this kind of manipulation. Yeah, I
(31:20):
think the 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
(31:41):
are an extrovert 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
(32:04):
mind with the with the psychic, we're talking like if
a 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, a kind of
a mentor a rock for you. Yeah, like you you
(32:26):
change the way you're describing, you change the language 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 could
just throw that out there and see what you catch. Yeah,
you're you're creating the illusion that you're narrowing the scope
(32:47):
without really narrowing 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
(33:08):
inhibit clarity. 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
(33:31):
you were to say you're a real dirt bag, and
you're like I don't know if the psychic really knows me.
Sometimes you're a real dirt bag, and then you have
to 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 got to 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 one. Yeah,
(33:52):
So that sometimes some and then at times that's a
great one because 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, uh.
(34:12):
And this was key and for his 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 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 laughing. The moment the students realized their
(34:35):
profiles were not unique, that's when they instantly knew the
personality sketch was bunk. So in this we get into
the whole fortune cookie scenario, Like, 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.
(34:55):
It's amazing how much that works. I mean, even knowing
what we know about fortune co he's not thinking they're magical.
Imagine if you were sitting at a table and everybody
opened their fortune cookie at the 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
(35:17):
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 poportulary. Yeah,
and you know, did some sort of you know, I
don't know, some sort of ritual right, or you know,
did something scanned you with some sort of device and
then read it out on a meter and then wrote
it down. If you had table preparation side fortune cookie preparation.
(35:40):
This could be big. This would allow you to to
perceive it as an individualized exercise, and then you would say,
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 forecast
your future. Yeah, so here's another one. Be flattering, flatter
(36:02):
the person. One of the findings of a nineteen literature
review by Dixon and Kelly was that there's some 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.
(36:24):
Then if they're mostly positive, and it doesn't have to
mean that they're all positive. In fact, 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
deep 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,
(36:46):
they need to have some flaws, they need to have
some some some strengths. You need to be able to
get behind the the idea that is the 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
(37:07):
stands up for what he believes in. He's true to himself. Yeah,
and you know he's uh, he's 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. And the president's too busy prepping,
and that's what he decides to tear up the tape.
(37:27):
So but but yeah, when a character is just too
unlikable instantly comes to mind that show Last Minute 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
(37:50):
a good show. But the character is so unlikable that
I ended up one of the last episode I watched.
I think I spent the whole thing just hoping Cannibal
while drors 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
(38:10):
watched Jaws, which we do everywhere on July four. Yeah,
but have you ever read the book? No, 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
(38:31):
they had to change it for the movie. It's hard
to imagine that now with as like lovable as Quint
is in the movie. Yeah, that's weird. No I read.
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 that's
the only cut I've listened to. But it was fun
(38:53):
in the day. Somebody fights a giant scud of the chainsaw. Right,
oh wait, let's get back. Yes, yeah, we have one more,
and this one is pretty simple. Project high status and
scientific authority. It kind of like if you put this
in the guise of the psychic reader or the magician,
like we're a fancy cloak, have a cool beard, right, Like,
drape yourself in the authority of the station you're in.
(39:14):
And if you're trying to, uh to to pull this off,
it's like a personality assessment thing, like, have some sort
of scientific authority to you throw out some scientific lingo,
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
(39:37):
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 yeah, it sounded
accurate because you're throwing out some some some jargon, throwing
out the name of an organization, and 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
(39:59):
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,
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
(40:19):
get inside your head a little bit and have a
positive effect on you. I mean you could argue that
to a certain extent, therapists you're using the same the
same devices, they're just using it with some sort of
ethical um structure in place. 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
(40:42):
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 of
this episode. Susan Krauss of Whitburn's when it comes to
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 to key three key things. One,
(41:05):
it allows others to scam you out of money, right
because because of the 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
device could be a particular test, could be apology, could
be a psychic on TV, could be an advertising UM slogan,
(41:25):
you know, like, oh, they really kind of got into
who I am. They know who I am. I should
buy their shampoo. 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. You're you're
trusting them, and now they can start telling you all
sorts of horrible things. And then number three, it makes
you less susceptible to good advice that isn't as lubricated.
(41:48):
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 packaged as these vague generalities. You
would get another test, you might actually not trust the
good feedback. Yeah, Or imagine the pyramid scheme guy, you know,
(42:09):
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 be careful about these investments. But
your actual accountants kind of boring and make yourself and
he doesn't. His information isn't as well lubricated as that
(42:30):
of the charlatan. So she has four 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 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
(42:50):
for statements that are 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 thinking about is this a statement that could apply
to anyone? And I'm just grabbing onto the bait and
then finally trust actual professionals as opposed to advertisements and
(43:11):
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, dr 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 not
(43:33):
like you know in 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, I should
have I should have thought to look him up before
the podcast episode, but he had it was like this
(43:53):
just normal looking, kind of Doughey dude, and he had
hair that was seemingly made out of plastic. I just
googled psychic gray plastic hare and the first result is
Dorian Gray syndrome. M Well, now I'm even more intrigued
that he may have this man they have suffered from
some sort of disorder that involved in aging painting. But
(44:14):
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, 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 other day
with the the general lyrical themes of pop music, and
(44:36):
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 a 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
have interesting, unique details that make them who they are.
For some reason, in fiction we connect better with specifically
(44:57):
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
person at any time, and people do seem to respond
to that. Yeah, because often the generalities are you know,
(45:18):
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 h Nails in high school,
there would be you know, it seems like in more
than one song he would throw in that line nothing
could stop me now, you know, and you know kind
of a you know, a dark gothy nine inch Nails la.
But you listen to you like, yeah, nothing could stop
me now you kind of pumping yourself up with it.
This is about my life, yeah, because I am facing
(45:41):
a challenge that I should not be stopped from. How
did he know so much about me? Trend just knows Trent.
Trent is a man of insight. Um. Likewise, another one
for me several years back, like a definite pop example,
the band Larou had to track Bulletproof, where the chorus
next time, baby, I'll be bulletproof and I don't know
(46:02):
what's even possibly it was 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 it's the trend principle, the tread principle. How about yourself,
any pop songs that resonate with you? Yeah, just looking
back in my history in my music player app, I
(46:23):
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 and drinking with Loving on
your Mind, which I mean that's pretty specific song, 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,
(46:46):
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 that that does
underligne like the two big trends in song, right, you
have those those ultras cific 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
(47:08):
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 your life onto. Indeed,
the classification of anthems is key, al right, so that
you have it, the for effect, the Barnum effect, whatever
you want to call it. It's all around us. It's uh,
(47:29):
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
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 will find all the episodes.
You'll find blog post videos, you'll find links out to
(47:52):
our social media account. We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler.
And if you want to let us know how you
reacted initially to our story about the audience surveyor or
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
(48:14):
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot
com
Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we
are going down down into the vault to revisit an
episode from Days of Old. That's right, this uh, this week,
we have an episode that originally published July two thousand
and fifteen, and it has to do a little bit
with old P. T. Barnum, who's in the well sort
(00:26):
of in the news again because there's a movie out
about his life. Right. Oh, I didn't even know that.
What's the movie? The Greatest Showman? The Greatest Showman, The
Greatest Showman that's in the greatest show on Earth but
making it Showman? Who's in it? Hugh Jackman, Old Wolverine himself,
Nice Barnum with claws. I have no idea. It's a musical,
so I probably will never see it. But at any rate,
his name is back in the ether again, so we
(00:49):
thought it a good opportunity to bust this episode out again.
What do you think about all you're singing? Oh, I
think he's fine. It's not necessarily my thing. Did you
see him in Lama's Rob No, No, you didn't see it. No,
I've only heard like clips of him singing. I generally
prefer him to you know, to be killing people with
claws or or bawling, uh, you know, emotionally. Yeah, he's okay,
(01:11):
he's okay singing anyway. Uh So I had no idea
about that. But there's your tie in. That's why this
is airing now. So I hope you enjoyed this episode
on the horror Effect. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your
Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to
(01:36):
Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
and I'm Joe McCormick. In. Today we're gonna be talking
about the science of personality assessments. Uh and full disclosure.
We wanted to let you know 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 filing. Yeah, so you
(02:01):
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 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
(02:23):
individual podcast audiences, so each podcast got their own and
it was based on a test originally compiled 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 was basically a
personality sketch that listed key personality traits that were characteristics
(02:45):
unique to each podcast audience. And so I picked like
five of the traits they listed as unique 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 to yourself, does that jive
with my outlook on life and how I view myself? Yeah,
(03:06):
so here we go. Number One, you tend to be
independent thinkers, hesitant to accept the statements of others without
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
(03:28):
strong desire for fairness and reciprocity in social situations. Five.
At times, you have serious doubts as to whether you've
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
(03:49):
Mind at how stuff works dot com and give us
feedback on on the sketch. And unfortunately, everything I just
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
(04:11):
a few pre existing generic descriptions. Hopefully nobody's upset about it,
but if you are, you can contact how 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 had just
made this up, I was thinking, Yeah, that's how I
(04:32):
view it. As a co host of the show. Yeah,
I am completely susceptible to this effect we're going to
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 all
tend to be. I'm sure that I tend to be
(04:53):
on the inside. Uh. If you weren't convinced, congratulations for
being a skeptical no at all. But if you work
and vinced, 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.
(05:15):
Both names refer to the exact same thing, and we'll
probably use the terms interchangeably today, but mainly we're gonna
use 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
(05:35):
to Barnum either that there's a sucker born every minute,
which apparently he did not actually say, or that Barnum
had something 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
(05:57):
he wants to draw in as many people's poss Yeah,
he's got a he's got to push those jugglers, you know.
But the former title comes from the American psychologist Bertram R. Forwer,
and 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
(06:18):
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, again famous for this ninety personality test and
his students. But he served as a psychologist and administrator
(06:38):
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 forwer test with his students. Fourer had
previously discussed with his students a sort of proto personality
quiz called the diagnot a stick interest blank, or d
(07:02):
I B, and this was a qualitatively evaluated test that
he explained in the following language. He said quote. The
d IB consists of a list of hobbies, reading materials,
personal characteristics, job duties, and secret hopes and ambitions of
one's ideal person. The test is interpreted qualitatively and personality
(07:23):
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 of his students, when they heard about the test,
asked to take it. They wanted to take the d
IB and received these tailored personality evaluations because you know,
(07:47):
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 we want we want to fill out that Dungeons
and Dagens 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
(08:08):
four 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 class and he handed back the individually tailored
personality vignettes, and each one was a list of thirteen
perceived personality attributes under the student's name, and the students
(08:31):
were instructed to keep the results private. That part was
important because, in fact, thirteen personality features listed on each
student's paper 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
(08:52):
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 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
(09:13):
presented problems for you. Disciplined and self controlled outside, you
tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you
have serious doubts as to whether you've made the right
decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain
amount of change and 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.
(09:37):
You have found it unwise to be too frank in
revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable,
while at other times you 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
(09:59):
knowing a and these are false, that these are just
you know, could be thrown out to anybody. I found
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
(10:21):
reveals in a footnote of his paper that quote these
statements came largely from a new stand astrology book, So
he just found a horoscope and 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
(10:43):
and five being perfect, the accuracy of the d I
B as a test, and then the accuracy of their
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 a question mark. Here were the results, as rated
(11:04):
by the students. The d I B got only one three,
it got twenty five fours, and it got thirteen fives.
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
(11:25):
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
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
(11:45):
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
that sink in for a second, eight out of thirteen
is sixty two per cent. So for some students, even
(12:07):
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 does that work?
What's your definition of perfect in this? I don't know. Well,
I think it comes down to something four explains in
his paper later about the discrepancy between our sort of
(12:30):
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,
subsequent studies have repeatedly demonstrated the Barnum effect under various circumstances,
so it's pretty safe to assume that for students weren't
just particularly gullible. In Art Carroll's entry in the Skeptics Dictionary,
(12:55):
he claims, quote, the test has been repeated hundreds of
times with psychology students, and the average is still around
four point two out of five or eight accurate. So
why are we so eager to gobble up worthless effectively
random assessments of ourselves? Well as as we'll discuss the
(13:17):
you know, a lot of the answer lies in the presentation.
You know, where this test was was taken and who
was given it to them, and then the 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
(13:41):
there's an even deeper issue going on with the nature
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 arning about the psychics of his day,
(14:03):
and and things like that. He says, they might 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 that pretty much every single psychological
(14:26):
trait can be observed in some degree in everybody. 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,
(14:48):
eliminated from the mix. Everybody deals with some level of anxiety. Right.
So another way of thinking about this is casting a
wide net. And you can see a very similar parallel
practice if you watch a psychic front of 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
(15:09):
spirit of someone known to someone in the room, it's
an older person, an older 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 an uncle named Jefferson exactly, yeah,
oh man, my uncle Jehosaphat. And then uh. And then
(15:30):
the psychic says, yes, that's right, Jehosaphat or Jefferson is
here with us, and and now we can talk to
Jeffer Josaphat. And then the client later says, wow, the
psychic somehow knew something about Jehosaphen, when in fact the
client has supplied the relevant specifics themselves. The psychic was
(15:50):
just trawling with a very large net. It would be
extremely weird if nobody in the room knew of a
deceased family member whose name started with J. Yeah, to
the odds are with you that you're going to catch
somebody with that very vague, very general bit of bait. Yeah.
But then the other principle is this principle of personal
(16:10):
or subjective validation. So how do you test the validity
of a diagnostic instrument, whether it's a horoscope or a
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?
(16:31):
Because this is subject to what for would call the
fallacy of personal validation. Because you are you, and because
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
(16:54):
ever think of an instance where social anxiety had a
meaningful role in your life? Yeah? Of course, yeah, every day.
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 there had to have been some
(17:15):
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
many or all people. Yeah. And part of this just
gets into our our enormous capacity, uh to place ourselves
in any story too, just the fact that we are
(17:36):
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 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
(17:58):
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,
serial murderers. You know, because if you have a well
executed serial killer story, um, you can still you still
(18:20):
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 killers relationship
with his mother or something like that, you're like, oh, no,
is this really the story of me? Yeah? Or like, uh,
(18:42):
I'm obviously thinking of Hannibal. Yeah, Hannibal actually came up
a couple of times in my mind looking through the
research here. Um, I think it was Joyce Carol Oates
has a book called Zombie that's essentially a retelling of
of the Jeffrey dalmer Um case, but with a fictionalized account,
and so even in this year, you're reading in it
(19:03):
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 some level at
some point in their their timeline with an example like that, Right, Yeah,
in a way, we're all that cannibal. Yeah. It makes
(19:25):
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, there actually is some
commentary on that in the literature, and we can get
to that in a bit. What are some other studies
(19:46):
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 there's pretty consistent result that
the subjects of personality assessments tend to rate assessments as
(20:06):
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 about the people who got eight
out of thirteen right, said that the test described them perfectly.
(20:28):
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 very bad tools. So let's say you're
an unscrupulous psychic or an unscrupulous psychotherapist. You can potentially
(20:50):
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 unscrupulous psychologist makes a diagnosis of a
person's personality, taking advantage of these, you know, very vague
(21:11):
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 access to powerful and accurate skills or
diagnostic tools. Then the psychic or unscrupulous psychologist makes bolder,
(21:36):
more specific, less credible diagnoses or or predictions that might
not have been accepted on the first go around. But
at this point the client thinks, well, he knew what
he was talking about the last time, so he must
know this time. 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
(22:01):
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 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
(22:23):
con somebody out of a large amount of money, say like, hey,
invest in my pyramid scheme, it'll you know, I can
give 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
(22:45):
Hawaii with the money. You probably wouldn't fly to Hawaii.
Where would you fly to? Cayman Islands? Yeah? Or the
Far East I'm thinking? Or the halls of Deacon Yeah,
always a good place that it's tough to get the
currency exchanged properly there, but but still still a good place.
A lot of kind and hanging out in the tests, right,
And this can be applied to more different types of
diagnostic tools and instruments than you might think. I mean,
(23:07):
so the obvious ones we've talked about are like the
personal powers of a person who claims to be a psychic,
or a certain type of psychological test, any one of
these personality tests you can take. But other things might
be methods of discerning personalities like graphology. Have you ever
heard about graphology? Not until preparing this episode, now yes,
(23:29):
So so four claimed that he was prompted to perform
this experiment after he was accosted in a nightclub by
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 are are really lame?
(23:50):
Like there's no in between there. If it involves being
approached by a grapholow, it sounds pretty cool to me.
I never get approached by graphologists when I'm out having
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,
(24:13):
with deliberately faulty techniques produce assessments that clients would find
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
(24:36):
relying on the fact that you're going to go, Wow, yeah,
it sounds like me and Bam, Now grophology works 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
(25:00):
the four effect um. And as we were chatting about this,
we kind of looked at at four different levels, like
at the very bottom level, you have essentially horoscopes and
fortune cookies. And it's worth noting on fortune cookies that
every time, even though we know those are just coming
from a crate in the back of the Chinese restaurant,
(25:21):
even though we really don't attribute any literal significance to
what's coming out of the cookie, they still resonate with
us because we still, at least for a second, we
just we suspend this belief just enough to engage in
a worldview where the future is more than mystery and chance. Right, absolutely, Yeah,
I have to ask, what's your favorite fortune cookie you've
(25:43):
ever gotten? Um, Years and years and years ago, I
got one that was said one day you'll write a book.
I was like, yeah, that's great, that's what 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, um it was you know, even though I
knew it was a vague statement, it's kind of like,
(26:04):
on some level, I took it as encouragement, right, yeah, yeah,
Oh I'm if I had gotten a fortune cookie that
said you will write a book, I would still have
that 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?
(26:28):
I'm not quite sure. Like it's telling you not to
file yourself with the file you wear a mouth card
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 card. Yeah well it could have been that, but
look to it. Take that fortune if you still have
it to your dentist and say look into it, and
I don't know, my dentist is moderately humorless. But okay, yeah,
(26:52):
so you have 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
(27:15):
end of 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. But
that was the first level. What's the next level? Then
the next level we think, uh? Then the next level
(27:39):
we think is, uh, the which X men character are you?
And and not necessarily just the wich X men character,
but any of these various pseudo personality quizzes based in
fiction U that end up. You know, it seems like
for a while they were always rolling out on Facebook.
It is like every day it was a new one
and you take this little, generally poorly x acuted quiz
(28:01):
and generally with very 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 they 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
(28:21):
because then the person 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
(28:44):
and it should be a surprise when it tells you
that you are joke or not. And from from there
we get into the next level, which, of course site
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
(29:08):
more specific hum 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
(29:30):
into it actively. 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
(29:52):
not the case. 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
(30:13):
overall positive experience 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 silver?
Were right? So I'm positive they are individuals. I know
their individuals who have had the experience with psychics and
UH and cold readers, and individuals using this technique where
they at least feel that there is some sort of temporary,
(30:36):
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,
(30:58):
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 instantly being called
out for for the kind of generalities that that are
that are hallmark of this kind of manipulation. Yeah, I
(31:20):
think the 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
(31:41):
are an extrovert 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
(32:04):
mind with the with the psychic, we're talking like if
a 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, a kind of
a mentor a rock for you. Yeah, like you you
(32:26):
change the way you're describing, you change the language 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 could
just throw that out there and see what you catch. Yeah,
you're you're creating the illusion that you're narrowing the scope
(32:47):
without really narrowing 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
(33:08):
inhibit clarity. 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
(33:31):
you were to say you're a real dirt bag, and
you're like I don't know if the psychic really knows me.
Sometimes you're a real dirt bag, and then you have
to 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 got to 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 one. Yeah,
(33:52):
So that sometimes some and then at times that's a
great one because 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, uh.
(34:12):
And this was key and for his 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 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 laughing. The moment the students realized their
(34:35):
profiles were not unique, that's when they instantly knew the
personality sketch was bunk. So in this we get into
the whole fortune cookie scenario, Like, 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.
(34:55):
It's amazing how much that works. I mean, even knowing
what we know about fortune co he's not thinking they're magical.
Imagine if you were sitting at a table and everybody
opened their fortune cookie at the 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
(35:17):
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 poportulary. Yeah,
and you know, did some sort of you know, I
don't know, some sort of ritual right, or you know,
did something scanned you with some sort of device and
then read it out on a meter and then wrote
it down. If you had table preparation side fortune cookie preparation.
(35:40):
This could be big. This would allow you to to
perceive it as an individualized exercise, and then you would say,
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 forecast
your future. Yeah, so here's another one. Be flattering, flatter
(36:02):
the person. One of the findings of a nineteen literature
review by Dixon and Kelly was that there's some 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.
(36:24):
Then if they're mostly positive, and it doesn't have to
mean that they're all positive. In fact, 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
deep 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,
(36:46):
they need to have some flaws, they need to have
some some some strengths. You need to be able to
get behind the the idea that is the 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
(37:07):
stands up for what he believes in. He's true to himself. Yeah,
and you know he's uh, he's 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. And the president's too busy prepping,
and that's what he decides to tear up the tape.
(37:27):
So but but yeah, when a character is just too
unlikable instantly comes to mind that show Last Minute 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
(37:50):
a good show. But the character is so unlikable that
I ended up one of the last episode I watched.
I think I spent the whole thing just hoping Cannibal
while drors 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
(38:10):
watched Jaws, which we do everywhere on July four. Yeah,
but have you ever read the book? No, 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
(38:31):
they had to change it for the movie. It's hard
to imagine that now with as like lovable as Quint
is in the movie. Yeah, that's weird. No I read.
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 that's
the only cut I've listened to. But it was fun
(38:53):
in the day. Somebody fights a giant scud of the chainsaw. Right,
oh wait, let's get back. Yes, yeah, we have one more,
and this one is pretty simple. Project high status and
scientific authority. It kind of like if you put this
in the guise of the psychic reader or the magician,
like we're a fancy cloak, have a cool beard, right, Like,
drape yourself in the authority of the station you're in.
(39:14):
And if you're trying to, uh to to pull this off,
it's like a personality assessment thing, like, have some sort
of scientific authority to you throw out some scientific lingo,
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
(39:37):
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 yeah, it sounded
accurate because you're throwing out some some some jargon, throwing
out the name of an organization, and 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
(39:59):
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,
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
(40:19):
get inside your head a little bit and have a
positive effect on you. I mean you could argue that
to a certain extent, therapists you're using the same the
same devices, they're just using it with some sort of
ethical um structure in place. 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
(40:42):
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 of
this episode. Susan Krauss of Whitburn's when it comes to
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 to key three key things. One,
(41:05):
it allows others to scam you out of money, right
because because of the 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
device could be a particular test, could be apology, could
be a psychic on TV, could be an advertising UM slogan,
(41:25):
you know, like, oh, they really kind of got into
who I am. They know who I am. I should
buy their shampoo. 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. You're you're
trusting them, and now they can start telling you all
sorts of horrible things. And then number three, it makes
you less susceptible to good advice that isn't as lubricated.
(41:48):
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 packaged as these vague generalities. You
would get another test, you might actually not trust the
good feedback. Yeah, Or imagine the pyramid scheme guy, you know,
(42:09):
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 be careful about these investments. But
your actual accountants kind of boring and make yourself and
he doesn't. His information isn't as well lubricated as that
(42:30):
of the charlatan. So she has four 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 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
(42:50):
for statements that are 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 thinking about is this a statement that could apply
to anyone? And I'm just grabbing onto the bait and
then finally trust actual professionals as opposed to advertisements and
(43:11):
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, dr 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 not
(43:33):
like you know in 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, I should
have I should have thought to look him up before
the podcast episode, but he had it was like this
(43:53):
just normal looking, kind of Doughey dude, and he had
hair that was seemingly made out of plastic. I just
googled psychic gray plastic hare and the first result is
Dorian Gray syndrome. M Well, now I'm even more intrigued
that he may have this man they have suffered from
some sort of disorder that involved in aging painting. But
(44:14):
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, 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 other day
with the the general lyrical themes of pop music, and
(44:36):
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 a 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
have interesting, unique details that make them who they are.
For some reason, in fiction we connect better with specifically
(44:57):
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
person at any time, and people do seem to respond
to that. Yeah, because often the generalities are you know,
(45:18):
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 h Nails in high school,
there would be you know, it seems like in more
than one song he would throw in that line nothing
could stop me now, you know, and you know kind
of a you know, a dark gothy nine inch Nails la.
But you listen to you like, yeah, nothing could stop
me now you kind of pumping yourself up with it.
This is about my life, yeah, because I am facing
(45:41):
a challenge that I should not be stopped from. How
did he know so much about me? Trend just knows Trent.
Trent is a man of insight. Um. Likewise, another one
for me several years back, like a definite pop example,
the band Larou had to track Bulletproof, where the chorus
next time, baby, I'll be bulletproof and I don't know
(46:02):
what's even possibly it was 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 it's the trend principle, the tread principle. How about yourself,
any pop songs that resonate with you? Yeah, just looking
back in my history in my music player app, I
(46:23):
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 and drinking with Loving on
your Mind, which I mean that's pretty specific song, 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,
(46:46):
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 that that does
underligne like the two big trends in song, right, you
have those those ultras cific 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
(47:08):
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 your life onto. Indeed,
the classification of anthems is key, al right, so that
you have it, the for effect, the Barnum effect, whatever
you want to call it. It's all around us. It's uh,
(47:29):
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
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 will find all the episodes.
You'll find blog post videos, you'll find links out to
(47:52):
our social media account. We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler.
And if you want to let us know how you
reacted initially to our story about the audience surveyor or
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
(48:14):
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