Why we take sentences about “people” personally

The dog says something about people in general, and the man immediately asks whether he means him. Before you look at the comic, answer silently: when someone says "people are…", how often do you apply it to yourself?

ComicThe dog talks, only the man can hear it. Below the comic: what experiments say about it.

Psíchologie, episode 2 · You mean me?

The man volunteered himself. The dog was talking about people, not about him. But when a general sentence fits us even a little, we hear it as a sentence about ourselves. And general sentences fit almost everyone.

Try it on yourself. Based on a single choice, the dog will tell you what you're like.

IllustrationIt runs one well-known experiment on you. Your choices aren't stored anywhere.

Pick the book you'd open tonight. Based on it, I'll tell you what you're like.

It's one of psychology's best-known experiments. In 1948 Bertram Forer gave 39 students a personality test and a week later handed each of them "their" description. Everyone got the same one, mostly copied from a newsstand astrology book. On a scale of 0 to 5 they rated how well it fit them at about 4.3 on average.

A sentence about everyone sounds like a sentence about me. That's why the man volunteered.

So is the dog right? Partly. He didn't come up with the line himself, by the way: Stephen Covey wrote it almost word for word in 1989 in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell (2012) start from the estimate that people devote 30 to 40% of what they say to their own experiences and opinions. In their experiments, people even gave up some money just to be able to talk about themselves.

What helps: a follow-up question. People who asked more questions in a conversation, especially follow-up ones ("And how did it turn out?"), were liked more by their partners. At speed dating they more often got a yes to a second date. They didn't expect it themselves (Huang et al. 2017).