The Barnum Effect

If you enjoy horoscopes, fortune-telling, online personality tests and all that sort of stuff look away now......
'The Barnum Effect' is often used by those mentioned above to make you think that they are correct and have some physic power. The reality is they don't.....

The Barnum Effect is when a person is given vague statements and descriptions but they see it as a very accurate reflection of themselves. The statements are so vague that no one can disagree with that description. People don't seem  to realize that the statements are vague and instead search for anything that may reflect them.
For example, psychologist Bertram Frorer had his students take a personality test. He gave them back a result with statements such as 'you can sometimes be critical of yourself' and 'at times you can be an extrovert, sociable, but at other times you can be introverted, reserved.' The students were satisfied with the description they got of themselves reporting it as very accurate. However, Frorer had actually given every one of them the exact same description. The statements in the description were so vague that they could apply to everybody at one point or another. This is how horoscopes work.

A horoscope for Scorpio, which I just looked up, contained statements like 'sometimes when the phone rings you already know who it is going to be' and 'articles about people's experiences that are similar to yours increase your understanding of that person'. Statements like this mean that reader is looking at it thinking it sounds exactly like them when actually it sounds like everybody.  Statements of  'you are sometimes X but you can also be Y at time's are a dead give away....they are giving you both options so you can't possibly disagree.

Fortune-tellers use the barnum effect in relation to predictions about the future. They provide a sense of control over the unknown. Again, the fortune-teller will give a broad statement knowing that what they say will most likely happen to the person at some stage. Also, people tend to read too much into what they are told and see the statement as true for some reason that doesn't really match up to what they were told. Lets say you are told that something bad will happen, the next day you can't find your car keys. You will tend to think that this must have been the bad thing when realistically losing your keys isn't really that bad. 

Is the horoscope that you are reading suddenly sounding very broad and vague? There are valid and reliable personality tests out there should you be interested in learning more about yourself. 

The Lucifer Effect

It is not uncommon that the actions of an individual shocks those who knew them before hand.
A recent example of this is the bombing of the Boston marathon on April 15th 2013. That afternoon I was flicking through the tv channels out of boredom when i came across CNN news. I immediately had a flashback of when I returned from school 12 years earlier and my dad called me into the living room to watch the events of 9/11 unfold. This time I was the one calling him into the room and we watched in disbelief and wondered what sort of a monster could do this.

Ex classmates of one of the accused culprits, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, described him as 'a nice guy ', 'an ordinary kid', one that 'you would never suspect anything out of the ordinary from'. Those who knew him before this were stunned by what appeared to have done (and is now convicted of doing).

Philip Zimbardo investigated what it was that made people do evil. He looks at whether those that do evil are actually evil or are they ordinary people responding to extraordinary situations. He demonstrated this in the infamous and disturbing Stanford Prison Experiment. 

In this experiment 24 male students from Stanford University were randomly assigned to the role of prisoner or guard. Every one of the participants were tested  before hand to ensure they did not have any psychological disorders. The prisoners were arrested and processed then placed into a makeshift prison in the basement of the university. They wore an inmate uniform with their own inmate number on it as a method of removing their student identity and replacing it with that of a prisoner. The guards were not given any specific training, they were told to do what they had to in order to maintain order. The guards had their own khaki uniform, again, removing any identification as the students the were. Prisoners were often told to do push-ups as punishment for disobedience. On day two the prisoners rebelled by ripping off their numbers and barricading themselves in their cells. In retaliation the guards stripped the prisoners naked and placed the rebellion ring leaders in solitary confinement. In order to maintain control the guards decided to try psychological tactics and create a privilege system involving privileged inmates getting food, clothes and a bed to sleep in. The other inmates had all these basic needs taken away from them. They turned the prisoners on each other by giving random prisoners privileges to make them look like informants. At this point non-privileged prisoners were even denied access to the toilet. Some prisoners began to show signs of emotional disturbance. Six days into the 14 day experiment it was called off as people began to express concerns about it. 

Below is an actual picture of  prisoners in the experiment.

This experiment demonstrated the importance of situation in the behavior of  individuals. Ordinary students who had no prior psychological issues began to do acts of evil such a removing the basic human needs of their fellow students. Even when fellow students started to display signs of emotional disturbance they did not stop the sadistic behavior. Afterwards  the participants reported feeling committed to their roles which felt real to them.

Philip Zimbardo's 'The Lucifer Effect' demonstrates that good people can do evil things in certain circumstances.

Bystander effect.

Picture this....you are walking down the street and you see a child being dragged away by a man. The child is visibly in distress, kicking and screaming saying 'Somebody help, you are not my dad'.What do you do?? The answer for the majority of people is...nothing.
Here is a short video of an experiment that tested this scenario.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1_JMPYxIzg

Most people did nothing. This is known as the bystander effect. The people around that are witnessing a person in distress do nothing in the assumption that somebody else will.

While the above example was only an experiment and no body was in real danger. This was not the case with 28 year old  Kitty Genovese. It was her case that led to the research on what was named the bystander effect. While she was walking home Kitty Genovese was stalked and stabbed for over half an hour by Winston Moseley. Numerous people knew there was an attack taking place and did nothing. Needless to say Kitty Genovese died in the attack. Similar incidents to this one have occurred since with no body coming to the help of the victim.

In general, the more people that are witnesses to a crime the less likely they are to help. This is called diffusion of responsibility. If you are one of five people that witness the crime then responsibility to help is only 20% yours so you are less likely to help. However, if you are the only witness responsibility to help is 100% yours.

How many times have you witnessed a person in need and just walked away? Just a few weeks ago I witnessed a woman fighting with a man over a bike. They were right beside me and the woman was saying 'Give me my bike back, please do not steal my bike' while the man struggled with her. Concerned for my own safety, I walked away. About 10 minutes later I saw the woman again cycling her bike. She had clearly won and did not have her bicycle taken from her in the end. Though that did not stop me feeling guilty about not going to help her.

So what would you do if you were in that situation? Would you go to the aid of the victim or would you walk away?

Over and out!

Alteration of memories

Events that occur after a memory is formed have to ability to alter that memory.
For example, lets say that you were best friends with somebody for a couple of years, then you had a fight and fell out. When thinking about that person again, you are more likely to remember them as that jerk of an individual that you fell out with rather than that nice individual you had all those fun times with.

This occurs because your memories are now biased by your beliefs about that person, this is known as confirmation bias. The act of remembering things about this person is filtered by a process called 'selective recall' wherein you only remember the things about that person that match your beliefs.

Here is a short Youtube video that pretty much sums up confirmation bias.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xMaR8au-YU

Memories are not reliable. This can pose great issues for eyewitness testimonies in court. I watched a documentary on this over the Christmas and was surprised by how easily an account of whole group of witnesses could be changed by one person confidently providing wrong descriptions. They went from recalling the crime they witnessed pretty accurately to giving a completely wrong description the next day. The person who committed the crime was even in the room with them and they did not notice a thing!! The confidence of that one individual was enough to get them to believe statements about the crime that were not true at all and thus bias their memory of the event.

This just goes to show, you may think you remember what a person is like or an event that occurred but your memory of this could be very wrong indeed!