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The fallacy of personal validation: a classroom demonstration of gullibility
by Bertram R. Forer · 1949 · 1 reading card
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The fallacy of personal validation: a classroom demonstration of gullibility · 1949
The colours are a language for conversation, not a diagnosis for hiring.
Academic psychology measures personality with the Big Five (OCEAN): openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. The difference from DISC lies in how it was built. The Big Five came out of statistical analyses of thousands of descriptions, has been replicated across many languages and cultures and predicts, modestly but measurably, outcomes such as job performance or health. The traits are continuous scales: most people sit in the middle, not in the corners. Type models cut the scale into boxes, and someone near a border can get a different «colour» on retesting; on type tests a substantial share of people change type after a few weeks. In 2018 the Swedish association Vetenskap och Folkbildning gave Erikson its ironic award «Årets förvillare» (Misleader of the Year), arguing that the model is presented as science without having its support. Then there is the Barnum effect, shown by Bertram Forer in 1949: he gave his students the same «personalised» profile, built from horoscope sentences, and they rated it on average above 4 out of 5 for accuracy. Colour descriptions contain many such sentences that fit almost anyone. And, as Walter Mischel showed in 1968, behaviour varies a great deal from one situation to the next — exactly what Sapolsky says in the first part of this course: context, hormones, fatigue and the group change what we do in the next minute. In practice: keep the colours as a conversational language («this analysis needs more Blue right now»), not as a diagnosis. Do not use them for hiring, for promotion or to pin a label on someone. If you want to understand personality seriously, start from the Big Five and from behaviour observed in concrete situations.
“You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.”