Quote Originally Posted by UltraliteAngler View Post
I saw a video once of a skeptic, I think it was James Randi in it. He went into a college classroom and handed people their horoscopes for that week. He asked people to read them and say what they thought. Virtually everyone was like: "Ooh! I did just meet someone new!" or "I had a job interview, I bet this 'unique opportunity' in the horoscope is referring to that!" and "I do just jump in head first, maybe I should dip my toes in instead, as the horoscope suggests."

Then James Randi was like: "Okay, I switched everyone's horoscopes. Cancers, you actually read the horoscope of Scorpios; Leos, you were reading the horoscopes of Libras" etc.

It was hilarious! You could just see the people squirming when they realized how easily they had been duped.
At a recent management retreat, we spent half a day on Gallup's "Strenthfinder" assessment. The lesson I learned from it was that if you give people a 20-minute online quiz and assign them to categories that tell them vaguely positive things about themselves, they will lap it up. Whether the jiggery-pokery is in the form of conclusions drawn from patterns in the stars or computer-assisted psychobabble, you can't go far wrong making it all about ME.