Pseudoscience Part 1: The Forer Effect and Our Gullibility
BY MELODİ BÜYÜKÖZER (PSYC/IV)
buyukozer@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
I am at one of the cafés in Bilkent during lunch time. There are girls sitting next to me and they are talking about this fortune teller one of them went to the other day. She is obviously impressed by the accuracy of the fortune teller's guesses about her. "She knew everything!" she says to her friends, and her friends seem to be overly enthusiastic about this teller. They actually consider visiting her and listening what she has to say about them, too. Then I pick up one of the magazines offered by the café and as I go through the pages I come to the astrology/horoscope page. One of the astrological signs is torn: Someone took it. They probably liked it and decided to keep it as a memoir? Later that day I meet a friend's friend. Probably because I am very talkative she asks me what sign I am, and after I tell her she says, "oh, then, we will get along with you very well!" This time I am impressed: Impressed that how people actually believe in all this in a way that is almost natural to them and how pseudoscience is a part of our everyday lives. But what actually is pseudoscience and why is it this popular? Pseudoscience is a set of theories that claim themselves as scientific but without any scientific foundation whatsoever.
Well, before I explain my point, I would like to practice a little fortune telling myself and try to guess about you: You can tell how successful I am by rating each sentence below on a scale from 0 to 5 (zero being "poor" and "5" being "excellent"), whether they match to your characteristics or not.
"You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extraverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic."
If you are done, I have a confession to make: I was not being completely honest with you. The sentences above are not actually a part of my amateur fortune telling attempt but a part of the classic experiment of Bertram Forer. In 1948, the American psychologist Forer gave his psychology students a personality test and he told them after an analysis, they will all receive a unique personality analysis based on their answers. After everybody received their analysis, he asked them to rate each sentence on how well it applied to them (as I did above). In reality, everybody received the same analysis (the one above). Forer actually took the analysis from a random astrology magazine. As a result, the average rating was 4.26. Everybody seemed to be satisfied with the answer. This study led to the term "Forer Effect," which refers to the tendency of people to rate rather vague statements that are applicable to a general population as as highly accurate personally. The experiment is repeated hundreds of times with other students for years and the robustness of the effect never changed. We obviously have cognitive biases towards accepting statements that seem to have a personal significance to us as true (subjective validation) and favoring information that confirm our preconceptions (confirmation bias). This tendency for cognitive biases is probably the factor that influences the popularity of pseudoscience and it is what the fortune-tellers and astrology base their readings on. Our accuracy ratings tend to increase when we perceive the statements as "unique for us" and the evaluator as an "authority." So, if the girls next to my table go to that fortune-teller already thinking that "she knows everything," their rating of the fortune teller's accuracy will increase. Then they will tell others how accurate she was and the show of pseudoscience will go on.