One Sketch for Every Student

Bertram Forer was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1914 and trained in clinical psychology at UCLA after undergraduate study at the University of Massachusetts, and after wartime service as a psychologist in a military hospital in France he settled into a career split between a Veterans Administration mental health clinic in Los Angeles and private practice in Malibu. In 1948 he ran a personality assessment exercise with his introductory psychology students that has since become one of the most repeated demonstrations in the history of the discipline: he administered a diagnostic interest inventory to the class, told each student the resulting personality sketch had been prepared individually from their own answers, and asked them to rate its accuracy on a scale of zero to five.

Every student received the exact same sketch, a paragraph Forer had copied almost verbatim from a newsstand astrology column, vague and flattering enough to read as true of nearly anyone: statements about needing others' approval while remaining independently minded, having unused capacity that had not been turned to advantage, and disciplined self-control masking inner worry. The average rating his students gave the sketch for personal accuracy was 4.26 out of 5, a result Forer published the following year and that has been replicated with almost identical average scores by researchers repeating the demonstration for more than seven decades since.