Thinking About Thinking: The Forer Effect.

Courtesy of Wikipedia:

In 1948, psychologist Bertram R. Forer gave a personality test to his students. Afterward, he told his students they were each receiving a unique personality analysis that was based on the test’s results and to rate their analysis on a scale of 0 (very poor) to 5 (excellent) on how well it applied to themselves. In reality, each received the same analysis:

You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.

On average, the rating was 4.26, but only after the ratings were turned in was it revealed that each student had received identical copies assembled by Forer from various horoscopes.

To summarize, the Forer Effect describes how people take things they hear – particularly positive things – and believe it applies to them for the sole reason that they think it’s supposed to apply to them.

The most obvious consequence of the Forer Effect is that it encourages people to believe in systems that tell things about themselves, even if those systems make no sense.

A couple examples of those obvious Forer-influenced systems:

• Horoscopes – a system about how the stars at the time of your birth dictate things about you.
• Japanese blood type personality prediction – a system about how your blood type dictates things about you. (the wiki seems written by someone who does not speak English as a first language)
• Phrenology – a system about how the bumps on your head dictate things about you.

The principle seems pretty simple: Humans have this little quirk, this ‘feature’, that can make us believe in silly things because they tell us things that we’re hardwired to want to hear and that we’re inherently inclined to believe.

But it’s a bit more significant than that. Vague statements make the effect more obvious, but the key to the effect is not the vagueness, but the impression of legitimacy of the source, which is what makes us inherently more likely to believe it.

As the Forer effect applies to any system which people believe legitimate, and which tells people things about themselves, this behavioral quirk applies to all systems which humans use to describe their own behavior.

This is a bit more significant, ’cause there are a lot of those systems, and some are considered pretty serious science this day and age.

Examples of systems to which the Forer effect applies that are (more)widely considered legitimate include:

• The Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator – a personality inventory that, given a wide battery of tests about what you prefer doing and what you like or don’t like, etc, tells you a bunch of stuff about yourself. Ditto any other personality inventories.
• Pretty much any measurement of Emotional Intelligence, by definition, is going to end up telling you a lot about yourself.
• While we’re talking about intelligence, IQ testing itself invokes the effect – it tells you about yourself and it’s very widely considered to be legitimate in doing so.

What seem to be very simple concepts would seem to invoke this inherently irrational feature in our behavior – introversion and extroversion, imagination and practicality, intelligence, wisdom…

It’s a phenomenon intricately tied into how we see ourselves – every time someone or something we trust says something about us, we’re inclined to believe it for no other reason than they said it about us.

Given all that, how much of our self-identities really describe us, versus just stuff we’ve been told describe us?

Anyway, all that philosophical navel-gazing aside, I think there’s a very practical application of this effect.

Human beings aren’t just inclined to believe things we think are about us. We enjoy hearing things that are about us. Invoking the Forer effect, even in nonsensical ways, appears to be emotionally and intellectually stimulating, and something that we inherently seek out.

My pet theory is that this is because being told things about ourselves is good for us – emotionally, and mentally. It strengthens our self-identity (for better or for worse, admittedly), and it ingrains concepts in our minds by associating them with something we obviously consider is important: Ourselves.

So being told about ourselves, even if those things are just outright false, can sharpen our focus and broaden our horizons – which I also imagine is why so many people tell themselves things about themselves so often.

So, knowing all this, why not use it? Take fancy personality, intelligence, and emotional intelligence tests. Read horoscopes. Find out which of the four humours you are (I’m phlegmatic!). Take the second half of this article seriously.

It’s good for you. Probably. After all, what’re the chances all the students in Dr. Forer’s class are wrong?

Categorizing Mysticism

So, my thoughts on mysticism have led in the direction of trying to describe some sort of model for dividing/specifying the functions of mysticism into modular parts. I’m not really familiar with any attempts to do this sort of things, so I’m just going to make up the terminology whole cloth using my general guideline for labeling: use nifty words.

By describing individual mystical functions, I hope to be able to pursue each of the functions independently, and work with them interrelated later, in the ultimate hope of being able to make a wholly artificial mystic experience (presumably, using some artistic medium as trigger, as I lack the ability to directly cause divine experience).

I’ve identified four different categories of mystical functionality based on what kinds of actions they encourage individuals to take. I have named the categories as follows: Anima, Ki, Logos, and Glamour.

Anima:

In spiritual terms, Anima is the interaction with the ‘spirit’ of a thing. It’s what you do when you worship an ancestral spirit, or pray to the god of math tests that you pass that final exam, or even when you threaten your computer to start working or else you’ll scrap it (it also describes my relationship with a specific traffic light I pass through on the way to work – that light’s a bastard, I tell you what).

In practical terms, Anima is anthropomorphism. Humans are social creatures, and our social capabilities do not simply turn off when we interact with things that aren’t humans (or even alive) – thus, our brains insist on trying to treat everything we interact with as if it were a person like us.

Ki:

In mystical terms, Ki is the manipulation of internal energies and emotions, sometimes with the intent of directly affecting the outside world. It’s something that can be invoked in emotion-controlling meditation, and it’s what triggers our fervent belief that we really can kill someone by just hating them hard enough, or a sudden second wind in an athletic event when we know people are cheering for us.

In practical terms, Ki is the logical extention of our empathic functions as people. It represents both an expectation that our emotions affect the world around us, and that the emotions we percieve of the world around us affect us. This function is similar to Anima in that it too exists because our social capability is ‘on’ all the time, in all situations – it causes us to get emotional impressions from things that do not actively express emotions, and it causes us to subconsciously expect objects to react to our own emotional expression as if those objects were human like us.

Logos:

In mystical terms, Logos is the sensation of ‘getting it’ – something which we feel when we learn and contemplate correct things (I imagine Colbert would sue me if I tried to call it “Truthyness”, but that wouldn’t be a bad word to use either).  Logos is what gives us confidence that what we know is correct, allowing us to trust in the world that we perceive.

In practical terms, Logos is a feedback loop caused by contemplating a series of thoughts that feature recursion (Example: A leads to B, B leads to C, C leads back to A). It’s arguably the foundation of modern learning systems, and it’s also the foundation of self-reinforcing systems of ‘facts’ which can cause cognitive dissonance by causing an individual to view all new information exclusively in the self-reinforcing context.

Glamour:

In mystical terms, Glamour is an indescribable, ineffable experience, frequently attributed as divine in nature.

In practical terms, Glamour is the effect of an extremely strong behavioral reinforcement function – neurologically, it’s probably a form of temporal lobe epilepsy – of course, knowing how it works doesn’t make such an experience any less intense. Understanding the precise triggers and functions of Glamour will probably prove harder than the other forces, despite our culture’s greater neurological understanding of it.

The next step, I imagine, would be to try to learn how to activate these functions at will in some way. Perhaps we can utilize the Logos that leads people to memorize and think in terms of intricate conspiracy theories, and turn it towards improving memory capacity? Or perhaps we can gain insights from wise use of our anthropic mystic functions, Anima and Ki, on inanimate objects or even abstract ideas? Maybe I could get the God of Mathematics (Checked Wikipedia, apparently there’s no patron saint) to help me on my trigonometry.

I’m pretty bad at trig.

The Cognitive Power of Belief

There are people who believe in very, very many things out there. That medicine can become more powerful the less of it you take, that Atlantis was a super-advanced civilization that interacted with aliens, that the universe is six thousand and change years old, that the leader of a group is in fact a god come to earth, that everything, including abstract objects like rivers and mountains, have souls, that our government is secretly working against us all, that our government isn’t working against us all… and so on. The gamut of human belief is absurdly wide, and the depth of human belief is similarly stunning.

I can’t help but think there’s something to that.

It seems clear from these beliefs that human beings are not rational creatures, that we function using some other fundamental thought method that only incidentally supports rationalism. But what method could that be?

I’m of the personal opinion that what we describe as ‘spiritualism’, ‘mysticism’, ‘religiousity’, and so on (henceforth to be called ‘mysticism’ ’cause I think the word sounds cool) functions as a kind of emotional interface to our conscious, cognitive and linguistic abilities, by functioning as a system of triggers that when activated cause us to learn associated ideas and behaviors quickly and persistently. So persistently, in fact, that we could have difficulty overcoming them consciously even if on a rational level we know they are incorrect.

The existence of the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance in regards to mysticism, in particular, fascinates me. What I imagine, is that what someone learns with strong facilitation by such a ‘mystical’ drive is something well-learned indeed, and unlikely to be overridden except through use of a comparably powerful cognitive tool.

All in all, it seems that mysticism, long used by hucksters and cult leaders to mislead and confuse people, could be used as a tool for good – and considering its’ power, used very potently indeed.

The first question would regard what we could use mysticism for – to that end, I would posit that the collective functions of mysticism serve two purposes for the human mind: To describe the world around us in an intricate and emotionally engaging way (descriptive mysticism), and to proscribe to us correct behaviors on a largely emotional level (proscriptive mysticism).

It seems to me the bigger question, though, is to precisely how to go about using mysticism constructively, a task which additionally entails coming to understand mystical functions in the human mind in greater depth.

I’m musing (pun appreciated, but not intended) on that one.