In 1948 a psychology professor named Dr. Bertham Forer distributed a detailed personality inventory to 68 of his students. It asked them a wide range of questions about their preferences, anxieties, and ways of engaging with others and themselves. The next week, he distributed the results to them, telling them they were all receiving a detailed personality assessment. He then, in order to test the validity of the personality inventory, asked his students to rate the accuracy of the results, on a scale of 1 to 5. 

The average score was a 4.3; pretty good, right? This is a pretty good personality assessment! Except it wasn’t. The students weren’t given detailed results on their personality, they were given the previous day’s horoscope that Dr. Forer had pulled from a magazine on a newsstand just outside. Not only were the results totally made up, they were identical, with every student receiving the same results. 

And yet, they rated it as more than 80% accurate on average.

The phenomenon is known sometimes as the Forer effect but more commonly, the Barnum effect. The Barnum effect describes the way that people tend to relate to broad generalizations as if they are specifically tailored to them and over identify with those generalizations. The effect is strengthened by the confidence of the speaker and their perceived authority.   

It’s called the Barnum effect in honor of P.T. Barnum, because the effect is so frequently exploited by fortune tellers, mediums, aura readers, and other assundy hucksters. It’s also a big part of why tv psychologists, online personality quizzes, tiktok diagnoses, and yes, horoscopes, can seem so accurate. 

Now, let me take a step back here: I have no judgment for you anyone who uses personality assessment tools to know themselves better. Any tool that creates language for deeper, more meaningful, authentic connection between people can be a place where God’s grace is at work. 

Here’s what I will say though, what this effect speaks to is first, a deep desire to be seen and known, and second, the infinite variability and deep connectedness of all of us. A classic Barnum effect style statement might be something like: “I like to go spend time with my friends, but sometimes I need alone time to recharge.” This is a statement that applies to basically everyone. As a person who is one the pretty far tail of the extroversion curve, even I want to be alone occasionally, and those who are on the opposite tail and generally prefer being alone, still want to see people they love. 

Saying “yes, this describes me” doesn’t allow for people to be seen and known the way they crave being seen, because the infinite amount of nuance allowed underneath that statement makes it basically meaningless. You learn nothing about someone when they say they agree with something like that. It gives the facade of being known but none of the real connection someone was looking for.

So why I am talking about this and what does it have to do with church, leadership, and innovation? 

I think when we seek to help our community, we are sometimes drawn to Barnum-style solutions. We want to try to be the church for “everyone,” we keep expanding the reach of our non-profit into new areas, we don’t want to leave anyone out, which is beautiful. But the result is that we cannot truly know, see, and serve those specific, discrete, unique people directly in front of us who we are called to. We fear specificity because we don’t want to exclude, but the result can be a program or service where no one is deeply known. 

What would it look like to get a bit more specific and authentic with our audiences? Instead of having a Monday night group that is ostensibly open to all but only the same 4 people come, what if there was a group that was specifically for new moms, or a gathering of professional artists and creatives, or a support group for people who had lost a spouse? 

Not all communities can support all of these separate types of groups, but maybe we could look around, and ask around, and see what needs aren’t being met. I once worked at a church that held a 7:00am breakfast for professional men that worked in the downtown area around our church, simply because we were in the right physical location to be a hub for chronically disconnected adult men.

There’s a lot more all of us can learn about meeting the specific needs of our community though asset mapping, and deep listening, but for now, I encourage you to avoid the Barnum temptation. Broad, sweeping generalizations and offers may feel like they meet everyone where they are, but they are a shallow response to a deep need to be seen and loved. If we take the time to listen more carefully to those people around us, and build things for their specific needs and lives, we can replace that facsimile with the experience of actually being known, and that is worth working towards.