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mmckenziejr01

Forer effect - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com - 0 views

skepdic.com/forer.html

Forer effect confirmation bias cognitive biases

shared by mmckenziejr01 on 31 Oct 17 - Cached
  • orer eff
  • The Forer effect refers to the tendency of people to rate sets of statements as highly accurate for them personally even though the statements could apply to many people.
  • Forer gave a personality test to his students, ignored their answers, and gave each student the above evaluation. He asked them to evaluate the evaluation from 0 to 5, with "5" meaning the recipient felt the evaluation was an "excellent" assessment and "4" meaning the assessment was "good." The class average evaluation was 4.26. That was in 1948. The test has been repeated hundreds of time with psychology students and the average is still around 4.2 out of 5, or 84% accurate.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In short, Forer convinced people he could successfully read their character.
  • his personality analysis was taken from a newsstand astrology column and was presented to people without regard to their sun sign.
  • People tend to accept claims about themselves in proportion to their desire that the claims be true rather than in proportion to the empirical accuracy of the claims as measured by some non-subjective standard.
  • The Forer effect, however, only partially explains why so many people accept as accurate occult and pseudoscientific character assessment procedures
  • Favorable assessments are "more readily accepted as accurate descriptions of subjects' personalities than unfavorable" ones. But unfavorable claims are "more readily accepted when delivered by people with high perceived status than low perceived status."
  • mmckenziejr01 on 31 Oct 17
     
    From the reading, the Forer effect seemed to be a good example of a couple cognitive biases together. The experiment and some of the findings are very interesting.
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