Forer Statements As Updates And Affirmations
The Forer Effect is a trick used by astrologers, psychics, and social psychologists. Given a list of statements like these:
…most people will agree that the statements accurately describe them. In fact, most people will feel like they’re unusually accurate descriptions, which is how astrologers get you. What statements show a Forer effect? Wikipedia just says they should be vague and somewhat positive. Can we do better? A lot of Forer statements above are about the contrast between internal experience and outward behavior - for example “disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside”. All of this is implicitly comparative - since there’s no objective measure for how disciplined you should be, “disciplined” implicitly means “more disciplined than other people”. Take this into account, and you can rephrase many of these statements as “Although everyone else is really X, you are Y pretending to be X”. Now the trick is obvious. You can access your internal experience, and you know what kind of things you’re pretending. But you can only access everyone else’s external presentation, which (absent specific evidence otherwise) you mostly believe. So whenever everyone is Y pretending to be X, it will feel like “although everyone else is really X, I am Y pretending to be X”. Consider the fifth statement above: “Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you”. Everyone has to go through their own sexual adjustment. But usually they hide it from everyone else except maybe some unlucky early sexual partners. Sexual adjustment is terrible, and so without any opportunity to calibrate, most people assume it can’t possibly be quite that bad for other people. So if an astrologer reads a star-chart and predicts “I bet you had an unusually tough sexual adjustment”, most people will agree the astrologer is right. The very fact that “your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you” is an effective Forer statement lets you turn it around and discover something new: most people’s sexual adjustments are harder than you previously thought. Phrased differently, you should decrease your confidence that your sexual adjustment was unusually hard. We can go through the list of Forer statements above, and rephrase each one as a useful potential update you can make to your model of the world:
Or you could phrase them as affirmations, or arguments for self-compassion:
These affirmations aren’t foolproof. 50% of people are in the top 50% of most-sexually-awkward people, and 1% of people are in the top 1% of the population. When I read these, I feel like most of the time I can think “Ah yes this is a Forer Effect good thing I caught myself before I believed it”, and then for one or two of them I think “No, I am just literally objectively in the top 10% of the population on that trait.” This is why I’m calling these “potential updates” instead of “absolutely correct articles of dogma”. Looking at this list, I can’t help thinking of what 4chan calls “normies” and what Tumblr calls “neurotypical people” (I know there’s a meaningful definition of “neurotypical” as people who don’t have some specific psych condition that you’re talking about, but I claim Tumblr uses it differently, in a way precisely equivalent to 4chan’s use of “normies”.) There’s a material aspect of normiehood - for NEETs, normies are people with jobs and happy relationships; for queers, normies are straight people. But this coexists with a psychological aspect. Normies don’t anxiously beat themselves up about things or fret about wasting their potential. Neurotypicals don’t have deep personality weaknesses they try hard to compensate for, or struggle with awkward sexual adjustments. They’re not unusually insecure, they don’t doubt what they’re doing, they’re not dissatisfied, they’re not logical independent thinkers. (confession: I had to omit the first Forer statement, the one about seeking the admiration of others, because that does sound like a normie trait) Is this use of “normie” / “neurotypical” what happens when a bunch of people talk to each other, realize that they all agree Forer statements apply to themselves, and imagine an anti-Forer outgroup? This would be hilarious, but I’m not sure it’s true. It does feel like (to spin up a stereotypical normie) some extroverted jock in a fraternity is less likely to say they’re self-critical, or pride themselves as an independent thinker. Is this because they really have less interiority? Do they just talk about interiority less, or so differently that people from other cultures don’t notice it? Or do they talk about interiority just as much, but I don’t hang out with enough fraternity jocks to ever hear them? I don’t know. You’re a free subscriber to Astral Codex Ten. For the full experience, become a paid subscriber. |
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