Many people are surprised that, despite lacking scientific foundation, the different divination systems that attempt to describe our lives can come very close to reality.
How do you explain why some divination tricks seem to work?
How can it be that, based on an apparently arbitrary criterion like a spread of cards, one’s own characteristics can be portrayed? Where is the trick? Although the different esoteric disciplines cannot offer any explanation for this that is subject to falsifiability of results, psychology has provided a construct based on experimentation that clarifies this phenomenon. This construct is what we know today as Forer effect
An experiment that showed the farce of divination
In 1948, the American psychologist Bertram R. Forer administered a personality test to his students. Then, the teacher gave each of the students a sheet with the results of the personality analysis. After this, he asked the students to rate from 0 to 5 how accurately, in their opinion, the personality analysis portrayed them, with 0 being “very poor” and 5 being “excellent.” The average of the scores was 4.26
The students’ surprise must have been enormous when Forer revealed to them that, in reality, they had all been given the same result. The individualized personality analysis was not such and, in fact, the text that was given to the students was nothing more than a single compilation of phrases extracted from horoscopes:
“You have the need for other people to appreciate and admire you, and yet you are critical of yourself. Although your personality has some weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not taken advantage of. Although disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be apprehensive and insecure on the inside. Sometimes you have serious doubts about whether you have done the right thing or made the right decisions. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and feel disappointed when surrounded by restrictions and limitations. You are also proud to be an independent thinker; and not to accept the statements of others without sufficient evidence. But you find it unwise to be very frank in revealing yourself to others. Sometimes you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while other times you are introverted, cautious, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be quite unrealistic.”
Shortcuts of the mind
In short, The Forer Effect is nothing more than the manifestation of a form of cognitive bias It shows the propensity to accept as original and proper descriptions that are actually ambiguous and general enough to be predicated of practically anyone. Thanks to this trend, Forer managed to pass off as original a “personality reading” that is characterized precisely by its lack of precision when talking about the attributes that a person can have, but that still surprised the students. for its faithful reflection of reality.
Furthermore, this experiment has been repeated many more times, obtaining very similar results (the people evaluated do not usually rate the precision of the analysis with less than a 4 out of 5). Thanks to these experiments we know that there are three factors that, when they occur, make the Forer effect more pronounced:
The explanation Why this happens is usually related to desirability and expectations. On the one hand, there is a tendency to give greater credibility to satisfactory explanations of reality, compared to others that do not satisfy us as much. Furthermore, the expectations of obtaining a personality analysis create a propensity to accept the results.
On the other hand, we embrace an explanation that makes sense of our experiences, and from that position we accept information that fits well with that explanation while we deny or ignore information that contradicts it: this is known as confirmation bias.
Knowing how the Forer effect works, it is easy to imagine why in some circles there is acceptance of some disciplines of fortune telling as the astrology Its esoteric nature means that apparently only a few people know how divination works, giving the fortune teller a role of authority.
The ambiguity It is a card that is always played, because the person evaluated will tend to give meaning to imprecise but broad and comprehensive explanations: this is especially clear in the case of the horoscope. In the case of real-time divination sessions, ambiguous statements at the beginning allow information to be collected from the subject evaluated, and therefore it is possible to dare to be more specific as the session progresses.
