A type of selective thinking whereby one, when presented with numerous general and specific claims about oneself or someone one knows, ignores the inaccuracies while interpreting the general claims as accurate. Forer convinced people he could successfully read their character. He amazed his victims at how accurate he was, though his personality analysis was taken from a newstand astrology column and was presented to people without regard to their sign.
P.T. Barnum, of Barnum & Bailey Circus fame, is known not only for saying that there's a sucker born every minute but also for noting that people are very selective in what they will believe about themselves. People will accept as true claims they know are false about themselves if they wish the claims were true. People will also give very liberal interpretations to vague claims about themselves or events in order to make the claims fit. People will also ignore false specific claims made by the "psychic" fortune teller, mind reader,etc., and by words or actions will actually provide the "psychic" with most of the information the client (i.e., sucker) thinks has come from the the crystal ball, the psychic realm, the supernatural, etc.
See related articles on astrology, cold reading, graphology,Myers-Briggs, palmistry and selective thinking.
reader comments
Hi,
In a Usenet post a while ago, you attributed the saying
"There's a sucker born every minute" to P. T. Barnum.
Those of P. T. Barnum's acquaintances who mentioned the subject were unanimous in insisting that he never said this. The closest thing to it that can be found in Barnum's writings is: "I said that the people like to be humbugged when, as in my case, there is no humbuggery except that which consists in throwing up sky-rockets and issuing flaming bills and advertisements to attract public attention to shows which all acknowledge are always clean, moral, instructive, elevating, and give back to their patrons in every case several times their money's worth" (the Bridgeport Standard, 2 Oct. 1885).
Captain Alexander Williams, a New York City police inspector
at the time, attributed "There's a sucker born every minute, but
none of them ever die" to Joseph Bessimer, a notorious confidence
trickster of the early 1880s known to the police as "Paper Collar
Joe". See P. T. Barnum: the Legend and the Man, by A. H. Saxon
(Columbia University Press, 1989).
--Mark Israel