Popular Horoscopes and the Barnum Effect

Popular Horoscopes and the Barnum Effect

The Barnum effect, according to Snyder, is "the acceptance of vague, general personality descriptions which contain statements with a high base rate of occurrence in the population" (Fichten & Sunerton). Meaning that it is the propensity of people believing these characteristics they read as true and significant. In curiosity, the Department of Psychology of Dawson College in Quebec, Canada conducted an experiment that was carried out to demonstrate the reliability certain people had on horoscopes and other astrological personality descriptions.

The study involved three hundred and sixty-six college psychology students of 1980-1981 who either have read their horoscopes before or not at all. Also, they observed how knowing their zodiac signs affected how useful they felt these descriptions were and these students were referred to Ss.

In the experiment, the Ss completed either the Eysenck Personality Inventory or the Rotter Internal/External Locus of Control Scale. Every question of each test pertained to how involved they were in horoscopes and their grades. These tests were based on two forecasts, daily and monthly. Daily forecasts were taken from two different daily newspapers and monthly forecasts were taken from two different women's magazines. In each procedure, Ss were instructed to rate, on a ten point scale, how useful these characteristics in the forecasts were to them; recall that some people had known their zodiac signs while others did not. Then nine faithful horoscope readers were observed while they worked, blind of the zodiac signs, matching daily forecasts. Five other faithful horoscope readers were observed while they did the same but for monthly forecasts for the accuracy of personality descriptions were studied. Two hundred and three Ss were to rate each of thirteen single paragraph descriptions to how much it was like them to nothing like them. It is understood that twelve of the paragraphs were astrology based and the thirteenth was based on Barnum. Many Ss rated all thirteen with the knowledge of the corresponding zodiac sign and others rated all thirteen without the advantage of knowing the appropriate sign.

Within the results there were four points. The first point is "personality and individual differences" (Fichten & Sunerton) It was found that women read horoscopes more frequently and believe that they are in fact accurate and significant to their personal life. Also, males were seen as less likely to find personality descriptions true. Another fact is that the results of the Rotter I/S Scale and grades in psychology were irrelevant to the horoscope reading tendencies; but results from the EPI were different. These scores showed the frequency of reading and how precise these readings were, just not any pertaining to characteristic descriptions. It was established that the more people