Bertram Forer (reference article)

This Wikipedia article on psychologist Bertram Forer is a tertiary biographical source, useful for orienting the basic facts of his career at UCLA and, most importantly, his 1948 classroom demonstration now known as the Forer effect or Barnum effect, showing that people readily accept vague, generalized personality descriptions assembled from astrology columns as uniquely accurate about themselves personally. As with any encyclopedia entry, its value is chiefly as a reliable pointer toward the underlying primary research rather than as a substitute for it, and readers wanting the finer methodological details of Forer's original demonstration, its class size and rating method, or the substantial body of later psychological research it inspired, should go to Forer's own paper and the subsequent replication literature rather than resting on the summary alone.