I like to think the people who read this blog will be a diverse group, coming from many backgrounds, but I suspect that most people reading it will fit a certain psychological profile. Please take a minute to read the following passage, and rate how well it fits your personality, on a scale of one to five:
You have a great need for other people to like and admire you, but you have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you haven’t fully realized. While you have some personality weaknesses, you’re generally able to compensate for them. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you can 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 like a certain amount of change and variety, and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and don’t accept others' statements without satisfactory proof.
How much does that sound like you, on a scale of one to five? I suspect that most of you read it and thought, “Yeah, that’s sounds just like me”, and rated it as a 4 or 5. But I also suspect that if you’ve read this far, you’re starting to see through my little games. You realized that almost anyone would read that passage and think it sounds like them. And they do. The passage is adapted from a study by Bertram Forer, who gave a group of people a personality questionnaire, and then gave them all identical results (a longer version of the passage above), and asked how well it matched their personality. The average rating was 4.3. If you give people a vague, reasonably positive statement that could apply to anybody, they’ll think it applies to them unusually well. This effect came to be called the Forer Effect, though it’s often called the Barnum Effect, after the great huckster P.T. Barnum, who is widely quoted as saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” The fact that he never really said it shows how true it is.
True to Barnum’s legacy, the effect explains a lot about how people can get suckered by vague advice. The Forer/Barnum Effect explains why horoscopes sound like they were written just for you, even though tens of thousands of people are reading the same one. In fact, Forer took his vague “personality profile” straight from an astrology column. Tarot card readers, self-proclaimed psychics, salespeople, and con artists (these categories may overlap) can use the effect to make people think they can see into their souls, when what they’re really trying to do is get into their pockets.
The Forer/Barnum effect doesn’t work with just any description of traits. It has to include a good helping of positive, socially-valued characteristics before people think it applies to them. That’s because the average person has a pretty high opinion of themselves. In fact, the average person thinks he or she is better than average.
Large majorities of people think they’re smarter, healthier, have better memories, are better drivers, better employees, and better students than average. Almost nobody thinks they’re in the bottom 50% on these measures, even though 50% of them must be, by sheer mathematical necessity. It’s impossible for the average person to be above average, but almost all of us think we are. This is technically called illusory superiority, but it’s often called the Lake Wobegon effect, after the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average”. We maintain our illusory sense of superiority with a self-serving bias. If we get a good job review, it’s because we’re good workers. If we get a bad job review it’s because the boss is unfair. When I walk to work, I think drivers are too impatient. When I drive, I think pedestrians should hurry up and get across the road.
As I've already discussed with the Dunning-Kruger effect, illusory superiority can get stronger the more below-average people are. The less intelligent and competent people are, the more likely they are to consider themselves highly intelligent and competent, whereas highly-competent, high-achieving people often have more realistic views of their abilities. In fact, they may be prone to self-doubt, or even the imposter syndrome, where they feel like they aren’t good enough to be in the high position they’re in. Another group with realistic views of themselves are mildly depressed people (deeply depressed people view themselves too negatively). This is called depressive realism. Most happy people are mildly delusional about themselves. Most people also think they’re less prone to biases than others (the bias blind spot), and more in control of what happens to them (illusory control).
Have you ever noticed that when you snap at somebody, it’s because you’re having a bad day, but when they snap at you it’s because they’re a jerk? When somebody cuts me off in traffic, it’s because they’re a terrible driver, but when I do it to them, well....everybody makes mistakes. This tendency to judge our own behavior (especially our less admirable behavior) in terms of circumstances, while viewing the behavior of others in terms of basic personality traits, is called the fundamental attribution error. As I'll discuss later, most people’s behavior is far more influenced by the situation than they think, with sometimes tragic results.
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