This is a demonstration of the fallacy of personal validation. (And yet personal validation is brought up in dozens of replies on Hacker News each day.) That de

This is a demonstration of the fallacy of personal validation. (And yet personal validation is brought up in dozens of replies on Hacker News each day.) That demonstration of the fallacy of personal validation was first made by psychologist Bertram R. Forer (1914-2000), who published a paper about the experiment in 1949.[1] Because Forer was the first to publish about an experiment on the issue, the phenomenon is sometimes called the Forer Effect.[2] The fallacy of personal validation is one of the bases of the practice of "cold reading," pretending to read someone's mind by throwing out wild guesses and observing which wild guesses are accepted by an observer.[3] [1] http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/Forer_The%20fallacy%20of%20personal%20validation_1949.pdf http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/... [2] http://skepdic.com/forer.html http://skepdic.com/forer.html http://badpsychologyblog.org/post/33441629830/the-forer-barnum-effect http://badpsychologyblog.org/post/33441629830/the-forer-barn... [3] http://skepdic.com/coldread.html http://skepdic.com/coldread.html http://denisdutton.com/cold_reading.htm http://denisdutton.com/cold_reading.htm