The Fallacy of Personal Validation: A Classroom Demonstration of Gullibility
Bertram R. Forer. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 44(1), 1949, 118-123.
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The founding demonstration, read in full from a scan of the original journal pages rather than taken from the citation everyone repeats. Thirty-nine students in Forer's own introductory psychology class rated one identical thirteen-item sketch as a description of themselves. Two things the secondary literature gets wrong. The famous mean of "4.3" out of 5 conflates two different ratings: from Forer's own Table 1 the mean rating of the sketch works out at 4.26, and 4.31 is the mean rating of the diagnostic instrument, which is a different question. And the detail that the statements came largely from a newsstand astrology book is **Forer's own footnote**, not a later embellishment: it is on the page. That last point matters here, because it means the founding demonstration of the effect was built out of astrological material by the man who named the problem.
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- The Barnum Effect
- For the demonstration itself, its numbers, and the footnote on where the sketch came from.