[vidarh]

I was bored and babysitting the other night, and "tested" the text used for the Forer experiment (the text is in the Wikipedia entry) on a phone chatline.

I took random lines from the text verbatim and added some minor flourish to introduce it and claimed to have an "intuition" on them based on their voice or their profile.

Of ca. 30 women, only one called me out on it (a registered mental health nurse...), and I got a steady stream of "OMG!" and "how did you know that about me?!?" and "wow, it's so accurate!", and demands I'd tell them more. Some even started asking sexual questions after exchanging a couple of messages with more bland statements from the Forer experiment for no particular reason.

It's downright scary how low the barrier is.

Then again, I should've been prepared for it, as 15 years or so I was seriously discussing with a friend whether to write a chat bot to pick up women after we observed you could get numbers from a reasonably high percentage (we're talking 20%-30%, though I'm sure that must've dropped by now that people are more used to being lied to online) by quite strictly following a very simple script and not deviating from it with next to no adaptation based on context.

[tokenadult]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect

http://www.skepdic.com/forer.html