tl;dr

I’m watching a meme get passed across various blogs (sniffyjenkins, secretdark, mayafish) linking to a website using pseudoscience hokum called “Colorgenics” to deduce personality traits based on which order you click some coloured cubes in.

Guys, this is nothing but the Forer effect. In 1948, a psychologist called Bertram R. Forer gave a class of his students a test and at the end gave them a tailored writeup of their psychological profile, asking them to rate it on a scale of 0-5 (with 5 being totally accurate). The average score was 4.26. Only afterward did he reveal that he had ignored the test results and given each member of the class the exact same profile, made up of empty statements culled from horoscope readings.

Let’s examine some of the Colorgenics results. Usefully, the URL of a test result set looks like this:

http://www.goldinuniverse.com/showprofile.asp?id=1/7/3/0/2/4/5/6/&name=PT%20Barnum

The numbers correspond to the order you clicked the coloured boxes in, so you can swap them around and quickly see the results of lots of different profiles. If you do so, you’ll quickly see the same paragraphs recurring. For example, 1/7/3/0/2/4/5/6 and 1/4/3/0/2/7/5/6 and 6/4/3/0/2/7/5/1/ are very different sets of answers, but they all say:

Being impulsive and irritable, your desires and needs are paramount. You do things with insufficient thought – with little regard to the consequences that may follow. As a consequence of this attitude, you may be experiencing stress and conflict.

This is classic Forer effect. It feels personal because it claims to have perceived a character flaw — “impulsive and irritable” — that you would like to keep hidden. But who can say that they haven’t, at some point in the recent history, acted impulsively or been irritable? It’s actually a universal truth. “You do things with insufficient thought with little regard to the consequences that may follow” is just “impulsive” written out again, with the extra wordiness acting to stress the point and lend the text an air of academic certainty. “[Y]ou may be experiencing stress and conflict” is another universal truth for pretty much anyone in the world. Even Tom Hanks alone on that island in Castaway was experiencing stress.

1/4/3/0/2/7/5/6 and 6/2/3/0/4/7/5/1 both finish with the paragraph

You would like to be respected and valued for yourself and this can only be achieved from within a close and harmonious relationship.

Again, if you consider this in isolation, it’s simply universally true of everyone. Everyone wants to be respected, and everyone fears that they aren’t. Everyone would like a close and harmonious relationship. Taken in isolation, these are simply pat truisms, not the dazzling insights they are presented as. I wouldn’t mind so much if the website was presented as a bit of fun, but dressed in all this hippy bullshit and selling something that sounds awfully like a pyramid scheme really gets my blood boiling.

If you’d like to know more, I highly recommend the excellent Richard Dawkins interviews Derren Brown YouTube videos. They discuss the Forer effect extensively, as Brown has used it as the cornerstone of several of his tricks.

Science