Color Quiz revisited

[tahnan]

I retook the color quiz, or rather, I had Python's "random.shuffle()" function take it for me. The results are, well, eerily accurate. "Circumstances are forcing him to compromise, to restrain his demands and hopes, and to forgo for the time being some of the things he wants"--indeed, until I finish my dissertation, I can't achieve a lot of the things I want. And so forth. Mmmm, Barnum Effect.

Comments

[jofish22.livejournal.com]

Ah, but the Barnum effect works because they're statements that are *true*.

Hampson, Sarah E., Gilmour, Robin and Harris, Paul L. (1978) Accuracy in self perception: the fallacy of personal validation. Br. J. soc. clin. Psychol. 17 231-235 Shows that subjects can distninguish true from false personality descriptions (of themselves) and suggests that astrology works __because most of the statements made are true.__

And beside, the degree of specifity of the results (2*8!) makes them seem even more true!

Snyder, C. R., "Why Horoscopes Are True: The Effects Of Specificity On Acceptance Of Astrological Interpretations", Journal of Clinical Psychology, 30(4), October 1974, pages 577-580. Found that if given the same set of general statements and asked to rate the degree to which those statements fit them on a scale of 1 (very poor) to 5 (excellent) subjects rated the statements on average 3.24 if told the statements were "generally true of people", 3.76 if they were based on the subject's year and month of birth and 4.38 if based on year, month and day of birth.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

What I wonder is this--and I don't know whether there's been a study done.

Suppose you give a subject this test. You calculate her results, you write them up on a single page. Then you pull N other results at random, for some N. (One? Two? More?) Shuffle the pages; hand them to the subject; ask her which one describes her best. See to what extent subjects choose better than chance.

Do the same for astrology, etc. etc.

[jofish22.livejournal.com]

i've seen a few variations on that.

i'll email you a copy of a paper i wrote which looked at the literature on horoscopes and the barnum effect, as part of a research project involving automatic horoscope generation on a very large scale. there's a few pieces in there that might be of interest to you.

[jofish22.livejournal.com]

Plus, superior, academic-paper know-it-all responses aside, it's got damn good results. I just did it myself and I agree with you, it's scary accurate. The relationship stuff in particular is almost embarassingly spot on.