I find it interesting when reading these Barnum descriptions to think about what it would take for the statement to be false. Once you do that, they lose a lot of the magic. In fact, some come out as downright laughable.
This reminds me of a semi-famous quote attributed to Bob Martin at AT&T: “Don’t include a sentence in documentation if its negation is obviously false”. I use this as a quick way of deciding whether I’m being informative.
I imagine that learning cold reading would help people with mild autism-spectrum disorders connect to others. A lot of casual conversation comes down to figuring out what people want to hear and (authentically and non-deceptively) telling them that.
That's of course the entire point - they're meant to be close to universally true. Yet people get suckered in by them.
When I first heard about it, I wanted to test it out, so I found a phone chatline and went on it, and left some inane greeting message stating I was a psychic and asking people to tell me tree things about themselves and I'd tell them something about them.
No matter what they told me, I'd read out the statement from the Forer "personality analysis" verbatim to them (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect), and about half of the people who had sent me messages were amazed (keeping in mind they'd self selected as someone who'd answer someone who claimed to be psychic...), and a few more were a bit skeptical but admitted I'd gotten a lot of it right. A couple insisted I must really be a psychic even after I admitted to what I'd done...
And this was while totally ignoring the free information they'd given me in their original messages.
Only one out of twenty or so "caught" that the statement were close to universally true.
Of course that's a small heavily biased sample with no controls, but it was pretty shocking to me how easily it was.
It would be interesting to see how much improvement you could get if you walked them through some sort of exercise like I described first, to see how much of the effect you could undo.
