Forer Experiments: Your Personalised Personality Profile

1. 
   Simon Bostock

   5 December, 2009

   I’m obsessed with this exper­i­ment, which I think’s been done in var­i­ous forms through­out the years.

   I like Der­ren Brown’s text the most (I have it printed next to my desk wait­ing for a day when I fancy some mind-numbing tedium and tran­scrib­ing it to Tum­blr) of all of them.

   What I don’t get is why every­one focuses on the log­i­cal fal­lacy. Big deal, we’re all sucky losers.

   Isn’t it amaz­ing that we’re pretty much all sex­u­ally mal­ad­justed outwardly-extrovert would-be nov­el­ist pipe-dreamers?

2. 
   Lloyd Morgan

   13 December, 2009

   It really is a fan­tas­tic exper­i­ment, and I, too, want to tran­scribe Der­ren Brown’s ver­sion to Tumblr/here. If you do it before me, let me know!

   This other angle is intrigu­ing, too. Per­sonal val­i­da­tion fal­lacy aside, the major­ity of Bar­num state­ments are quite spe­cific on some areas: would-be nov­el­ists, for example.

   As you say, it really is amaz­ing that “we’re pretty much all sex­u­ally mal­ad­justed outwardly-extrovert would-be nov­el­ist pipe-dreamers”.

   It’s amaz­ing that we are the above, yet still think we’re the only peo­ple with this ‘unique’ set of traits.

   How self-centred we can be, right? How dare you have my aspirations.

3. 
   Lloyd Morgan

   31 January, 2010

   Der­ren Brown’s text:

   You are a per­son prone to bouts of self-examination. This is in sharp con­trast to a strik­ing abil­ity you have devel­oped to appear very socially engaged, even the life and soul of the parrt; but in a way that only con­vinces oth­ers. You are all too aware of it being a facade.

   This means that you will often be at a gath­er­ing and find your­self play­ing a part. While on the one hand you’ll be talk­a­tive and funny, you’ll be detach­ing your­self to the point where you will find your­self watch­ing every­thing going on around you and feel­ing utterly unable to engage. You’ll play con­ver­sa­tions back to your­self in your head and won­der what that per­son really meant when he said such-and-such – con­ver­sa­tions that other peo­ple wouldn’t give a sec­ond thought to.

   How have you learned to deal with this con­flict? Through exer­cis­ing con­trol. You like to show a calm, self-assured fluid kind of sta­bil­ity (but because this is self-consciously cre­ated, it will cre­ate bouts of frus­trated silli­ness and a delight in extremes, or at least a delight in being seen to be extreme). You most eas­ily rec­og­nize this con­trol in how you are with peo­ple around you. You have learned to pro­tect your­self by keep­ing peo­ple at bay. Because in the past you have learned to be dis­ap­pointed by peo­ple (and because there were issues with you adjust­ing to your sex­u­al­ity), you instinc­tively keep peo­ple at arms’ length, until you decide they are allowed over that magic line into your group of close friends. How­ever, once across that line, the prob­lem is that an emo­tional depen­dency kicks in which leaves you feel­ing very hurt or rejected if it appears that they have betrayed that status.

   Because you are prone to self-examination, you will be aware of these traits. How­ever, you are unusu­ally able to exam­ine even that self-examination, which means that you have become con­cerned about what the real you is. You have become all too aware of facades, of sides of your­self which you present to the world, and you won­der if you have lost touch with the real and spon­ta­neous you.

   You are very cre­ative, and have tried dif­fer­ent avenues to uti­lize that abil­ity. It may not be that you specif­i­cally, say, paint; it may be that your cre­ativ­ity shows itself in more sub­tle ways, but you will cer­tainly find your­self hav­ing vivid and well-formed ideas which oth­ers will find hard to grasp. You set high stan­dards for your­self, though, and in many ways are a bit of a per­fec­tion­ist. The prob­lem is, though, that it means you often don’t get stuff done, because you are frus­trated by the idea of medi­oc­rity and are wea­ried by the idea of start­ing some­thing afresh. How­ever, once your brain is engaged you’ll find your­self sail­ing. Very much this will likely lead to you hav­ing con­sid­ered writ­ing a novel or some such, but a fear that you won’t be able to achieve quite what you want stops you from get­ting on with it. But you have a real vision for things, which oth­ers fall short of. Par­tic­u­larly in your academic/college sit­u­a­tion, you are cur­rently fight­ing against restraints upon your desire to express your­self freely.

   Your rela­tion­ship with your par­ents (there is a sug­ges­tion that one is no longer around, or at least emo­tion­ally absent) is under some strain. You wish to remain fond of them but recent issues are caus­ing frus­tra­tion – from your side far more than theirs. In fact they seem unaware of your thoughts on the mat­ter. Partly this is because there are ways in which you have been made to feel iso­lated from cer­tain groups in the past – some­thing of an out­sider. Now what is hap­pen­ing is that you are tak­ing that out­sider role and defend­ing it to the point of con­sciously avoid­ing being part of a group. This will serve you well in your cre­ative and career pur­suits. You have an enor­mous cyn­i­cism towards those who pre­fer to be part of a group or who exhibit any cliquey behav­iour, and you always feel a pang of dis­ap­point­ment when you see your ‘close’ friends seem­ing to fol­low that route. Deep down it feels like rejection.

   How­ever, for all that intro­spec­tion, you have devel­oped a sen­sa­tional, dry sense of humour that makes con­nec­tions quickly and wit­tily and will leave you mak­ing jokes that go right over the heads of oth­ers. You delight in it so much that you’ll often rehearse jokes or amus­ing voices to your­self in order to ’spon­ta­neously’ impress oth­ers with them. But this is a healthy desire to impress, and although you hate catch­ing your­self at it, it’s noth­ing to be so wor­ried about.

   There’s also an odd feel­ing that you should have been born in a dif­fer­ent cen­tury. You might be able to make more sense of that than I can.

   There are some strong mon­e­tary shifts tak­ing place at the moment. Both the recent past and what’s in store over the next few months rep­re­sent quite a change.

   You have links at the moment with Amer­ica*, which are quite inter­est­ing, and will look to yield worth­while results. You’re nat­u­rally a lit­tle dis­or­ga­nized. A look around your liv­ing space would show a box of pho­tos, unor­gan­ised into albums, out-of-date med­i­cines, bro­ken items not thrown out, and notes to your­self which are sig­nif­i­cantly out of date. Some­thing related to this is that you lack moti­va­tion. Because you’re resource­ful and tal­ented enough to be pretty suc­cess­ful when you put your mind to things, this encour­ages you to pro­cras­ti­nate and put them off. Equally, you’ve given up dreams a lit­tle eas­ily when your mind flit­ted else­where. There are in your home signs of an excur­sion into play­ing a musi­cal instru­ment, which you have since aban­doned, or are find­ing your­self less inter­ested in. (This may alter­na­tively relate to poetry and cre­ative writ­ing you’ve briefly tried your hand at and left behind you.) You have a real capac­ity for decid­ing that such-and-such a thing (or so-and-so a per­son) will be the be all and end all of every­thing and be with you for ever. But you’d rather try and fail, and swing from one extreme to the other, than set­tle for the lit­tle that you see oth­ers con­tent with.

   Con­clu­sion: It’s very inter­est­ing doing your read­ing, as you do present some­thing of a conun­drum, which won’t sur­prise you. You are cer­tainly bright, but unusu­ally open to life’s pos­si­bil­i­ties – some­thing not nor­mally found among achiev­ing peo­ple. I’d say you’d do well to be less self-absorbed, as it tends to dis­tance you a lit­tle, and to relin­quish some of the con­trol you exer­cise when you present that styl­ized ver­sion of your­self to oth­ers. You could let peo­ple in a lit­tle more, but I am aware that there is a dark­ness you feel you should hide (much of this is in the personal/relationship/sexual area, and is related to a need­i­ness which you don’t like).

   You really have an appeal­ing per­son­al­ity – gen­uinely. Many thanks for doing this, and for offer­ing some­thing far more sub­stan­tial than most.

   *This was changed to ‘Britain’ for US sub­jects. (I sug­gest ‘peo­ple abroad’ as a catch-all.)

4. 
   Lucy

   11 January, 2011

   Where do I get more infor­ma­tion about the Forer experiment?

5. 
   Lloyd Morgan

   27 January, 2011

   Lucy — If you fol­low all of the links pro­vided in my post above, all your answers about the Forer exper­i­ment should be answered.

   If not, how­ever, what infor­ma­tion are you look­ing for exactly?

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