How well do you really know yourself?
horoscopes, palm readings, personality tests
they all claim to describe your true personality
we asked some people to write down their:
date of birth, city of birth, favorite color
here are the results of their personality tests
- Alright guys, thanks for your patience.
I have the results of your personality test
based on the information that you gave me.
Now these are customized for each of you
so I'm going to ask you as you read the results
please keep them to yourselves right now.
Alright, so Abel,
Keith,
Allison,
and Eugene. - Eugene
Okay.
- No peaking - Don't look.
- Don't peak at mine.
So how accurate are the results?
- Uh, yeah I would say that this is pretty accurate.
A lot of the things in here are like
the things that the little voice in the back of my mind says
so it's really spooky that
someone got all this information about me.
- Not sure how you can get
even a close to accurate reading of someone's
sort of personality by, you know,
things that seem arbitrary like your birthday
or the colors you like
or where you were born.
- Yeah this is eerily accurate
and also my worst fear is realized,
the final line cuts me to my core.
It says "Some of your aspirations tend to be unrealistic"
which I'd say is my greatest fear always.
That I'm aspiring to things that I don't deserve
and that I'm not qualified to do.
- Yeah I feel like most of it's accurate,
there's a few things that are,
I don't really think are very accurate.
I did have an astrology phase where I was
really in astrology but I was always the guy
who read every single sign
and I always felt like I related to something in every sign.
- Okay everybody, how did I do?
Was I pretty accurate?
- Uh, yeah!
For me it was like, there was like
a 80 to 85 percent that I was like "yeah"
and then there was also a line specifically about
how I don't accept other people's statements sometimes.
- Well does anybody want to share some of the
specifics, you know, bring them up
and we can talk about them.
- Yeah there's one that's,
"You also pride yourself as an independent thinker
"and do not accept other's statements
"without satisfactory proof.
"Some of your aspirations tend to be
"rather unrealistic, you can't-
- Was this like a...
I feel like I have, I have the same stuff.
- You have a similar one?
- I have the exact same line - I have the exact same one
- That's pretty funny.
- You all have exactly the same feedback.
- Wow. - What?
- Oh this was a psychological test!
- This isn't, this wasn't... (laughing)
- Now listen, this probably felt
pretty personal though, right?
I mean two minutes ago felt like it was really about you.
- [Keith] Yeah.
- And the reason it feels so personal
is that in fact it's very very general
so it can apply to anybody. - [Eugene] Yeah
- This is called the the Barnum effect
and this is basically what you would find
in a lot of online personality tests,
a lot of online horoscopes or newspaper horoscopes.
In fact, every single sentence in what you got
at one time or another was in a horoscope.
- [Keith] We've been hoodwinked!
- We've been fooled!
- I wasn't quite hoodwinked.
- You were! (laughing)
- I was completely!
- I was like, "pretty good job!"
- You almost made me cry, almost.
(laughing)
- I never buy into, like,
horoscopes stuff, so like this I was like
"Oh man, this is so right!
"What am I doing? How can you gather you this information?"
Of course they couldn't! It's fake!
- But I think that what this taught me
is that all the time people try to tell me
what type of person I am
and I tend to believe them but I shouldn't.
- The whole experience is making me question
every quiz I've ever taken,
especially that "Which Meryl Streep Character Are You?"
so I guess I'm not that much
Devil Wears Prada as I thought I was.
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