Subjective Validation

Subjective Validation

David Kyle Johnson

The year that Saturn and Mars are equal fiery, The air very dry parched long meteor: Through secret fires a great place blazing from burning heat, Little rain, warm wind, wars, incursions. Nostradamus, Century IV, Quatrain 67

We can test a statement by comparing it with evidence. For example, a claim that dropped objects accelerate at 9.9 m/s/s can be tested by dropping objects and measuring their acceleration under specified conditions. Subjective validation occurs when we judge a statement’s accuracy or meaning by our personal reaction: how it feels or how well it seems to fit. That reaction can be persuasive even when the evidence is weak.

One way we consistently (and inaccurately) validate statements subjectively is by concluding that they apply to us personally. This was first demonstrated by Bertram Forer in 1948. In his now infamous study (see Carroll [2015]), he gave the exact same generic, general, and vague personality description to all his students, which read in part:

You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self‐controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside.

He then asked them how accurately they thought the description they had received described them specifically and personally. (Each student thought he was receiving a unique description.) Most thought it was dead on; the class ranked its accuracy as 4.26 out of 5, and those results have been repeated with essentially the same results countless times. (The overall average is around 4.2.) A generic description can feel as though it singles us out. This is now known as the Forer effect (see Carroll [2015]).

The Forer effect helps explain why people find astrological horoscopes and tarot card readings accurate. Combined with other mistakes, like confirmation bias and availability error, subjective validation can fool people into thinking that psychics can read their minds, predict the future, or even communicate with the dead.

It is a key component of cold reading, a technique used by psychics to fool people they have never met into thinking that they have information they don’t actually have. (They read the information off of them “cold,” hence “cold reading.”) During a cold reading of a crowd of people hoping to communicate with their recently deceased loved ones, you might hear something like this:

MEDIUM: I’m feeling like there’s a name with an S sound, maybe a father figure, possibly from this part of the crowd.

SITTER IN THE AUDIENCE: My husband Sam just passed. I and his two sons miss him.

MEDIUM: Yes, Sam is telling me that he too misses you and the boys.

The medium is giving something very general – there are lots of S names, and “father figure” could be someone’s husband, someone’s father or grandfather, or even a son that is a father – that is bound to apply to someone in the crowd. The medium is counting on the Forer effect – for someone in the crowd to apply that general “S name/father figure” statement to herself or her deceased loved one. When she does, the person in the crowd is likely to reveal some specific information – in this case the deceased’s name and that he had two boys. The medium then repeats that information back to her, to solidify the notion that the statement did apply to her, thus reinforcing the Forer effect. (And thanks to the malleability of memory, the sitter will also likely later think the medium knew her husband’s name before she said it.) The sitter will likely be amazed and conclude the medium couldn’t have known what he seemed to know unless he had the ability to speak to her deceased loved one. (Consequently the sitter will likely spend lots of money on the medium’s materials and future psychic readings.)

But we don’t just validate statements subjectively by making them about ourselves; we can take anything that is vague and make it apply to what we want. The clearest example of this comes from the (supposed) prophet Michel Nostradamus, who made predictions that he himself admitted were intentionally vague. People love to read these things and think that Nostradamus was predicting the future, but the only way you can think this is if you subjectively validate the statements as accurate after the fact – that is, if you make them about what you want them to be about.

Take the opening quotation. I found an internet meme that claims it is about 1986 – because of a February 18 Saturn/Mars conjunction, Halley’s comet on April 11, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster on April 26. But I could just as easily make this about 2016. In 2016, Mars’s closest approach to Earth and that of Saturn were only four days apart, there was major drought in California, there were two major meteors seen in North America alone (on May 17 and June 2), for unknown reasons (“secret fires”) a giant wildfire broke out in Fort McMurray (in Alberta, Canada), and there was little rain, warm wind, wars and incursions in the Middle East (as there usually is). And with about 10 minutes of internet research, you could make this “prediction” apply to just about any year you wanted.

But it’s not just “internet scholars” who have this problem with Nostradamus’s predictions. The “experts” do too. Take this passage:

From the Orient shall emerge the African heart to trouble Hardie and the heirs of Romulus along with the Libyan fleet the temples of Malta and nearby Islands shall be deserted. (Sharma [2001], 39)

Nostradamus scholar Erika Cheetham thinks that “Hardie” in lines 1–2 “refers to Henry IV. The man who troubles him from East [the Orient] is the Duke of Parma. Lines 3–4 refer to the siege of Malta.” Nostradamus scholar Henry Roberts, on the other hand, thinks this is a “remarkably prophetic description of the role of Emperor Haile Selassie, in World War II, who reconquered Ethiopia, in East Africa and sent an expedition to aid the Allied Cause, eventually defeating the Fascists of Italy, self‐styled ‘Heirs of Romulus’” (see Schick and Vaughn [2014], 123).

Which is it? It’s neither. It’s so vague, you could make it about almost anything at all. If it was a real prediction, you could tell what event it was about before the event happened. If you can only tell what event a statement was predicting after an event happens, then it didn’t really predict the event. That’s retro‐diction, not prediction. The passage isn’t really about anything – it’s just vague.

Although the subjective validation of Nostradamus’s “predictions” doesn’t fuel much else besides silly beliefs in the paranormal, falling prey to subjective validation can be much more costly. The same subjective validation “retro‐diction” techniques are also used to interpret the prophecies of the Bible, like those that are supposedly in the Book of Revelation. And when Harold Camping convinced people, based on such readings of scripture, that the end of the world was going to occur in 2011, many people literally spent their life savings to help him spread the message (see Seidl [2011]).

Wasting your money on psychics is one thing; but what would you do if you sold everything you owned based on someone’s subjective reading of scripture, sat and watched the news all day for news of the rapture, and then it didn’t happen? So be aware when subjectively evaluating statements for truth or meaning. Although you may occasionally get it right, more often than not you will be led astray by your tendency to read into things. More often than we realize, we apply statements to ourselves and make them say what we want them to say.