If you'd be so kind, we'd like to give you a quick personality assessment. We think you're a generally cheerful, well-balanced person with some alternation of happy and unhappy moods. You're neither overly conventional nor overly individualistic, and you have a wide array of interests. While you have some personal weaknesses, you're generally able to compensate for them. How did we do? If that sounds like a perfect description of your personality, congratulations: you just fell prey to the Barnum effect.

Overly Generalized, Just For You

The Barnum effect is named for the one and only P.T. Barnum, the showman famous for declaring that "there's a sucker born every minute." The term refers to the way you (and we!) are willing to believe that an overly broad personality description is meant just for you. It's sometimes called the Forer effect, after the professor who first tested the phenomenon on college students in 1949. He administered a personality test to all of his students, then told them that he would analyze their answers and give them a "brief personality vignette" one week later. Unknown to the students, everyone got the exact same personality description, full of unspecific statements such as "You have a great need for other people to like and admire you" and "You have a tendency to be critical of yourself," most of which Forer got out of an astrology book he bought at a newsstand. Still, when asked to rate its accuracy on a scale of 1 to 5, most students gave it a 4 or higher. "The data show clearly that the group had been gulled," Forer wrote (perhaps somewhat gleefully).