Rhetoric of The Barnum Effect

The Barnum Effect is well illustrated in a monologue delivered by Jane Russell in the 1952 film, Macao.

The beautiful young woman looked deep into my eyes and told me that I had overcome many obstacles, that I worked hard but had trouble in my life and that I felt like no one understood me but that things would soon be looking up for me.  I looked at her lovely face with its clear olive skin and dark eyes.  She was right about the past.  Would she be right about the future as well?  I looked at the cards she'd laid out and saw the Ace of Wands, The Tower, the Daughter of Discs.

"What do the cards themselves say?" I asked.

"Oh, but I don't look closely at the cards.  It isn't my way.  I tell a story.  I see a story in the cards.  Is that alright?"  And then she told me again about how no one understood me in almost the same words as before.

I didn't smile.  I didn't frown.  In fact, I tried not to move a muscle in my face.  That was difficult because my mind had already begun to chuckle and would soon burst into guffaws.  After the fourth go-round about how I'd suffered, was suffering, but would soon experience a better life, I cut her off, paid her (though she said I didn't have to if I didn't like the reading) and walked outside where I did start laughing.

I was amused because I was getting a cold reading.  The young "psychic" who shared a booth at the Bite of Bend Festival on June 23 was trusting to The Barnum Effect.

Now, I appreciate real tarot readers, people who know the cards and apply them and their archetypal imagery to living creatures as a form of sacred play with the powers of the universe.  Cold readers, however, play off the hopes and fears of suckers like myself.

The rhetoric of the cold reading is based on the idea that a few believable details snatched out of the universe of probability can induce people to cough up further details about their lives.  The Barnum Effect is a type of cold reading first scientifically tested by psychologist Bertram Forer in 1948 and later labeled by psychologist Paul Meehl.  It's also called The Forer Effect or subjective validation or the personal validation effect. Forer gave his students a paragraph descriptor of an individual and then asked them whether or not it was a description of them.  Most students responded that the descriptor was about them personally, not about others.  Professor Michael Birnbaum of Cal State Fullerton has a lecture on the Barnum Effect and the Skeptics Dictionary has a thoughtful description of the experiment.

Spurious psychics, those who are out to prey on others rather than those committed to a type of prayer, will use these  techniques to lead clients or marks to offer up more personal information and to sell other products (future readings).

At the festival, I was momentarily snookered but as soon as my reader refused to look at the actual cards, I knew something was up.

Lately, I've been reading the work of Jungian James Hollis and in his most recent book, What Matters Most, he says that we all feel exiled, we all feel as though people don't understand us.  It's part of the postmodern human condition:  "We are all exiles, whether we know it or not, for who among us feels truly, vitally linked to the four great orders of mystery:  the cosmos, nature, the tribe, and self?"