This activity is a good introduction to a scientific inquiry as well as discussion in the psychology vs parapsychology introduction. The Forer effect refers to the tendency of people to rate sets of statements as highly accurate for them personally even though the statements could apply to many people.
Show students the importance of specific vs vague statements, demonstrate why horoscopes and psychics work and why people tend to believe in these seemingly random encounters. Introduce research in psychology testing and creation of psychological assessment.
Give students a questionaire to fill. The questionnaire should be irrelevant to the personality profile but still seem to be psychological - similarly to zodiac signs.
Examples of questions are: - How often do you eat chicken meat? - How often do you follow weather forecast? - Which geometric shape you like the best? - What is your favorite colour?
After students have filled in the questionnaire, create their personality profiles. The more “official” they look, the bigger the effect - tehoretically :) Each one is the same with the same Barnum statements. Stress out that they should not share it at this moment with their peers.
Have them “mark” each statement as “correct”, “wrong”, or neither. And then let them mark the final profile.
After they return the profile, start a discussion
After they hand you in their results, you can do the Which desert are you activity (in files). And then followup with the discussion.
Before the discussion, give students the option to “guess” what this activity tried to accomplish. Then tell them about the statemtns and that everybody got the same thing. Discussion topics
It is a good idea to analyse their results and potentially pinpoint those questions in which most people answered true/false.