A little over a month ago I wrote a post named The strangest thing, where something really odd had happened to me. Here I was thinking that some sort of surreal thing had happened, but a friend of mine named Pablo from Chile gave me an explanation that seemed more likely than what I thought had happened. It’s called the Forer Effect:
The Forer effect (also called personal validation fallacy or the Barnum Effect after P. T. Barnum’s observation that “we’ve got something for everyone”) is the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. The Forer effect can, assuming their actual falsity, provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some pseudosciences such as astrology and fortune telling, as well as many types of personality tests.
And one more thing, namely Cold Reading:
Cold reading is a technique used by mentalists and fortune tellers, psychics, and mediums to determine details about another person in order to convince them that the reader knows much more about a subject than he or she actually does. Even without prior knowledge of a person, a practiced cold reader can still quickly obtain a great deal of information about the subject by carefully analyzing the person’s body language, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. Cold readers commonly employ high probability guesses about the subject, quickly picking up on signals from their subjects as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not, and then emphasizing and reinforcing any chance connections the subjects acknowledge while quickly moving on from missed guesses.
According to my friend, between the numbers 1 and 4, most people will choose 3. Between 1 and 10, people choose 7 or 10. The most common flower out there, for men at least, is the rose. Doing this type of thing to a woman is quite different though. I guess this explains why he wanted money, but who can know for sure but him. :)
Thanks Pablo for clearing stuff up.
