‫The Barnham effect, also known as the four EFO RTR effect.
‫This is the tendency for people.
‫To believe that very vague.
‫Personality descriptions are accurate and describe them quite well.
‫So.
‫The word Barnham comes from P.T. Barnum, who is a famous circus, you know, put on circuses and knew
‫all the different sorts of games and theater tricks of running a circus and putting on a performance
‫in this certain type of a performance of cold reading, telling people stuff about themselves, you
‫know, hand reading.
‫Fortune-Telling.
‫Talking to, you know, talking to dead relatives.
‫You've seen this kind of stuff on TV probably as well.
‫Part of this is people still the whole idea of people having a personality and having personality tests
‫is.
‫A very new idea.
‫So.
‫Most people do not even know their personality in depth.
‫They don't know if they have how much variability they have in their personality.
‫So it makes sense that some of this could be a historical artifact and that if everybody was consistently
‫taking strong personality tests and measuring things and planning their life according to their personality
‫or their career.
‫This kind of thinking, probably.
‫This kind of bias would not exist to the same level, but to this to the extent that somebody doesn't
‫know themselves.
‫And doesn't know how common a lot of these attributes are in other people and just as low overall personality
‫intelligence, you can call it,
‫they're going to fall for this kind of stuff.
‫So that's the Barnham effect.