The “Barnum effect,” also known as the Forer effect, is the name given to the phenomenon by which people voluntarily give their approval and acceptance to interpretations of their personality, supposedly derived from the results of certain evaluation procedures ( ).
It has also been defined as the tendency of people to accept statements that are vague, ambiguous, and have a high probability of occurring in the general population, as descriptors of their personality. The name is due to the famous circus owner whose formula for success was to always have something for everyone ().
On the other hand, the alternative name refers to Bertram Forer (), the psychologist who discovered this tendency of people to accept descriptions that could be applied to most people. He administered a personality test to his students and then gave the same feedback to everyone, also asking them to rate the accuracy of the description from 0 to 5. The average he obtained from the students was 4.26.
A while ago, Fabián Maero wrote an article about the Forer effect, and at the beginning of it he put the same text that Forer used as feedback for his students in his first experiment, asking readers to rate how accurately the text described them. Do you want to see the results?