Preview test - 1

Preview Test

You will listen to two lectures and one conversation. You will hear each lecture and conversation one time.

After each listening passage, you will answer some questions about it.

You will have 20 minutes to both listen and answer the questions. The questions ask about the main idea and supporting details.

Some questions ask about a speaker’s purpose or attitude.

You may take notes while you listen. You may use your notes to help you answer the questions.

Your notes will not be scored.

In some questions, you will see this icon: This means you will hear part of the lecture or conversation again.

When you are ready, press Continue.

Listen to a lecture in a psychology class.

M: How many of you know what pseudopsychology is? OK, well, to put it simply, pseudo means false, or, uh, not genuine. So, pseudopsychology is basically a system of beliefs that sort of resembles psychology.

However, it is completely unfounded, like astrology, or palmistry. . .you know, looking at a person’s palm and suggesting that the lines there have some sort of meaning.

Things like reading your horoscope, or getting your palm read−those are examples of pseudopsychologies.

Anyway, when we talk about pseudopsychology, you probably wonder why so many people believe it. Are they just gullible? Actually, scientists think that one of the reasons people believe in pseudopsychology is due to the Barnum Effect.

What’s the Barnum Effect? Well, it describes the tendency to believe personality profiles or horoscopes when they are worded ambiguously.

Pseudopsychology got its name from Phineas Taylor Barnum. If the name sounds familiar, you probably recognize him as the famous circus master who believed that a grand circus is one that has “a little something for everybody”.

In the same way a typical reading will have something about one’s love life, at least one declaration of future financial prospects, and always something about personality.

Here’s the thing . . . In pseudopsychology, providing something for everyone means telling people what they want to hear.

For example, a typical description contains two extremes of one’s personality, such as “Sometimes you are extroverted and sociable, while at other times you are introverted and aloof”.

Do you all see what I’m getting at here? The person can identify with at least one part of the reading because it is ambiguously worded and represents two extremes.

A description like this makes it easy for the person to confirm that it’s true!

So, what proof do we have that the Barnum Effect even exists?

Well, in 1949, a man named B.R. Forer began to investigate the existence of the Barnum Effect.

What he did was give thirty-nine undergraduate psychology students a personality test.

Without them−I mean the students−without them knowing, they were all given the exact same result: an open-ended reading of their personality strengths and weaknesses.

Next, Forer had them rate the reading on a scale of zero to five, with zero meaning the reading didn’t accurately portray their personality at all, and five signifying that it was extremely accurate.

The average rating the students gave was a 4.3, meaning that most students actually believed the ambiguous, open-ended personality descriptions.

Just to see if the results could be replicated, Forer went on to try the experiment on others and, lo and behold, he came up with the same results time and time again.

So, clearly, it doesn’t matter that we’re talking about an educated group of subjects here−an invalid personality assessment tool can be easily mistaken as being compellingly legitimate by anybody if it’s vague enough.

Does anybody have any questions about Forer’s experiment? If not, we can move on.

Another important investigation took place at Lawrence University under the direction of Peter Glick, another psychologist.

Glick wanted to find out how the content of readings might affect the way they’re interpreted.

So first, he separated his students into two groups based on whether they considered themselves skeptics or believers of horoscopes.

Next, he gave each group some horoscopes, which were all the same, except that they were worded differently, so um, the same meaning but different words.

When given their horoscopes, only the “believers” group confirmed that the negatively worded horoscopes were accurate.

But here’s the funny part: people from both groups rated their readings as accurate when the horoscopes were presented in a positive light.

This shows that while the cynical participants wouldn’t believe the negative readings, they were willing to accept the positive ones, because, as we all know, everybody wants to hear good things about themselves.

1.What is the main topic of the lecture?

2.Why does the professor mention palm reading?

3.Listen again to part of the lecture. Then answer the question.

Pseudopsychology got its name from Phineas Taylor Barnum. If the name sounds familiar, you probably recognize him as the famous circus master who believed that a grand circus is one that has “a little something for everybody”.

In the same way a typical reading will have something about one’s love life, at least one declaration of future financial prospects, and always something about personality.

What does the professor mean when he says this:

In the same way a typical reading will have something about one’s love life, at least one declaration of future financial prospects, and always something about personality.

4.Listen again to part of the lecture. Then answer the question.

So, clearly, it doesn’t matter that we’re talking about an educated group of subjects here−an invalid personality assessment tool can be easily mistaken as being compellingly legitimate by anybody if it’s vague enough.

What is the professor’s opinion of people who believe inaccurate readings?

5.According to the professor, why didn’t the group of skeptics in Glick’s experiment believe the negative readings?

6.What can be inferred about the implications of the Barnum Effect?