The Barnum effect Greeting Card
Designed and sold by Sketchplanations
$3.70
$2.96 when you buy any 3+
$2.59 when you buy any 10+
$2.41 when you buy any 50+
$2.96 when you buy any 3+
$2.59 when you buy any 10+
$2.41 when you buy any 50+
$3.70
Product features
- Digitally printed cards on heavyweight stock
- Uncoated blank interior provides a superior writing surface
- Each card comes with an envelope for mailing or gifting
- Since every item is made just for you by your local third-party fulfiller, there may be slight variances in the product received
The Barnum effect
The Barnum effect is our tendency to apply personal meaning to statements that could apply to many people.
For statements such as the results of a personality test, the effect is stronger if:
we believe they are personalised to us
they are sufficiently vague — handy phrases include "at times," "a tendency to," "some of," etc.
they are mostly positive — we're more inclined to accept positive evaluations of ourselves than critical ones
they come from a source of authority
You may recognise these tricks from a horoscope or your star sign, magicians, fortune-tellers, fortune cookies, con artists and, perhaps, marketing. There's a fascinating magician's technique you may have seen called cold reading that uses the Barnum effect with other tricks ("I see someone with heart pain in your family.") to make it seem like they know a lot of personal details about someone at a first meeting.
Originally from Bertram Forer, who called it "the fallacy of personal validation," it was later known as the Forer effect until Paul Meehl suggested it should be named the Barnum effect after P. T. Barnum (now of The Greatest Showman fame) for the way he could easily fool an audience with these techniques and to emphasize that we should all know and be on the lookout for being fooled. For that reason, I called it the same here.
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