Bertram Forer

Bertram R. Forer ( born October 24, 1914 in Springfield, Massachusetts; † 6 April 2000) was an American psychologist. He is known for the description of the Barnum effect, which is also called Forer effect after him.

Forer was born in 1914 in Springfield, Massachusetts. He studied psychology at the University of Massachusetts and the University of California, Los Angeles. During World War II he worked in a military hospital in France, and later worked as a psychologist in Los Angeles in a psychiatric clinic for war veterans and in his own practice in Malibu ( California).

In his classic experiment in 1948 Forer pretended to perform a personality test to his students. He then handed them ostensibly the evaluations and invited them to the veracity with values ​​from 0 ( strongly disagree ) to 5 ( = applies very well to order.) Although all evaluations contained the exact same text, Forer had assembled it from a horoscope available at the kiosk, the students awarded an average of over four points. The experiment was repeated and confirmed many times.

The Forer effect shows that people tend to validate generalized character descriptions, although they can apply to almost all human beings as well. Reason for this is that we want results and predictions coincide with our own characteristics and requirements. This experiment is regarded as fundamental to the assessment of psychological tests.