“You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. At times you have serious doubts whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. Security is one of your major goals in life.”
Do these statements sound like they can apply to you? If so, it may be because they are Barnum statements. You might have encountered similar descriptions in personality quizzes, horoscopes, or psychic readings. These vague and general personality statements seem to convince readers that their character has been accurately analyzed. But what they all have in common is that people tend to accept them as uniquely applicable to themselves without realizing that the same description could be applied to just about anyone. Using such statements, pseudoscientific personality assessments have a clever way of amazing their readers. These tests just seem to “work”.
Personality tests on the internet are for the most part, not valid. Yet they’ve convinced thousands of readers that they are accurate. Are we just gullible? Is it just wishful thinking? Perhaps we’re all just seeking to make sense of ourselves or looking for a sense of coherence. In any case, people generally accept these statements as true and continue to consult online quizzes.
When a person finds personal meaning in general statements such as these, they are experiencing the Barnum effect, an expression named after the great circus showman P.T. Barnum who has famously claimed that he “has something for everybody”. Indeed, these statements have something for everybody. I just advise you take them with a grain of salt.
