Some time ago, Shudongjing was very bored, so he used the horoscope robot in the QQ group to test this year's fortune. As expected, the fortune interpretation given by the robot, especially the personality description of the tree hole spirit, made the tree hole spirit a little bit unable to help but want to ask: Have you installed a camera in my house?
In fact, this is the magic of Barnum effect in psychology. That summary of personality traits is like a snake oil, applicable to everyone.
The proposer of the Barnum Effect is psychologist Bertram Fowler. This refers to the tendency for people to believe general personality profiles. Even if these overviews are empty and abstract, people still believe them.
A psychologist once conducted such an experiment, conducting a personality test for students in a school. Then, issue two test reports to all students who took the personality test. One of them is a real personality test report, while the other is a report compiled based on the Barnum Effect.
Afterwards, the results proved that more than half of the students felt that the unified report more accurately described their personality.
Based on the influence of subjective verification, people tend to pay too much attention and interpretation to everything related to themselves. In layman's terms, it's just brainstorming.
Someone once said that it is much easier to plot against a smart person than against a fool. Because as long as you give smart people a little bit of inducement information, they will complete the information you give, and they can often provide it to the person setting up the trap, dig the hole by themselves, jump by themselves, and finally bury it by themselves. One-stop service, nothing too attentive.
Those fortune-telling masters on the market are often good at this. If you write a book "How to Make a Magic Stick", the Barnum Effect will definitely occupy an important space. They often use a variety of ambiguous expressions, combined with information gathering such as observing words and expressions, to make people think that they are inscrutable.
Generally speaking, everyone is born with the hope of being understood by others. As long as some ambiguous information is given, human beings, with their strong brain-computing ability, are often more inclined to choose an interpretation method that makes them happy.
Of course, if we want to use this trick, we need to be very careful. Once used improperly, there is a high chance of being labeled as a magic stick.
In fact, there are many chicken soup articles on the Internet that seem to make sense but are actually useless. They are also typical applications of the Barnum effect. Attract attention by grasping the general psychology of the public.
If we don’t want to be affected by the Barnum effect, the best way is not to think about anything from just one angle, but to change several angles and think deeply. We can easily find out if there are any traps.
Foreign researchers have done such an experiment. They took three groups of subjects to different rooms for personality tests. Ask the first group, after getting the results, to give examples in life that can confirm the results. Ask the second group to give examples from life that refute the results. Ask the third group to give examples that corroborate the results. Also give examples that refute the results.
The final result of the experiment was that the first group believed that the unified personality test answers were very credible. The third type is the least affected by the Balam effect. Being skeptical is the strongest. And the second group is based on between the two.
This experiment fully proves that dialectical thinking has a strong restraining effect on the Barnum effect. Therefore, everyone must be vigilant in daily life, especially when they are praised and become happy. Be careful and you may fall into someone else's trap if you are not careful.
As the saying goes, there is no distinction between good and evil in the sword, only in the human heart. Everything in this world has two sides. The Barnum effect is no exception. In fact, in daily life, skillfully applying the Barnum effect can also help us build good relationships with people faster.
If we find the right moment when chatting with the other party and say something to make the other party feel that you understand him well, the relationship between the two people will immediately become closer and warmer.
In formal psychological counseling, it is the initial stage of establishing a counseling relationship. This trick has been tried and tested repeatedly. Therefore, we do not need to talk about this effect in a negative light. The best choice is to look at all issues dialectically.
