the tendency to believe that vague predictions or general personality descriptions, such as those offered by astrology, have specific applications to oneself. Coinage of the term has been attributed to Paul Everett Meehl; it alludes to a remark allegedly made by U.S. showman Phineas T. Barnum (1810–1891) to the effect that “There’s a sucker born every minute.” The effect was termed the fallacy of personal validation by U.S. psychologist Bertram Robin Forer (1914–2000), who first studied it in 1949.