Almost creepily accurate 'Color Oracle'

[Mal7]

One cannot choose at random, there is always an unconscious part that biases the choices. However, if one wants to do a pseudo blind test, the most simple is to ask a person A to do the test, and then see if the results are accurate enough (whatever that means) for a person B whom we know is not in the same emotional state (but how to know that).

I think there are other ways to do a fake test also, with the aim of seeing if the fake results are just as creepily accurate or not. E.g. you could just choose the colours in order from left to right and top to down, or number the rows and columns and then use consecutive last digits from phone book numbers or decimal places of Pi to choose them. As a more extreme step, if you had a person B handy, you could get them to bookmark / print the results of your real and fake test without telling you which is for which test, and ask you which you think is more accurate.

I'm sure there could be some degree of accuracy that the colours that one chooses in a real test, and the readings given based on those choice, could reflect something about one's state of mind. But if a fake test produces readings that are also reasonably accurate, I think that would be a sign of the Forer/Barnum effect.

 

[mkrnhr]

Or one can use a simple computer pseudo-random number generator, it takes just a couple of lines of code to generate. However, besides the possible philosophical considerations on true or perceived "randomness", a person A with a substantial psi power can also affect the outcome. Channeling the higher self could do that too :D

 

[obyvatel]

When we speak of accuracy here, what exactly are we referring to? How we feel in the moment when taking the color test or general personality traits revealed by the description or something else?

What would be the "something else"?

In my case, I can say that it was quite accurate, I suppose "my" accuracy was proportional related to my subjective? state of mind, regarding the anxious/worried some thread, I did first chose the light blue color ... and do still think/contemplate in the question, though ..

If I understood you correctly, you meant that the accuracy in your case was referring to your current state of mind when you took the color test.

Per my understanding, "current state of mind" is a changing thing. So if someone would take the test multiple times, he/she would choose different set of pleasant and unpleasant colors in keeping with their current state of mind.

Personality traits are more stable compared to current state of mind. The two are not independent - some personality traits would influence the current state of mind somewhat consistently (otherwise they would not be personality traits). So maybe some choices of color would be consistent when taking the test multiple times.

If the accuracy primarily refers to "current state of mind", then to gauge the accuracy of the test, one could write down what one feels in the moment before choosing the colors. Then one can see how much match was there between one's own report and the color report.

If the argument is that it is the unconscious mind that influences the choice and hence it is not known to the subject before the choice is made - one pretty much needs to accept what the color descriptions say because one does not know. In that case, accuracy does not really come into the picture as far as I can see.

Now if the test mainly describes personality traits, then the color choices should be relatively stable when the test is retaken multiple times. Also like Buddy said, the results should correlate with a different standardized personality test like MMPI. If we believe that no personality tests are accurate, and so correlations are meaningless - then the color test should also fall under the "not accurate" category.

OSIT

It says this about the test in the first post of this thread

Keep in mind that your unconscious plays a major role in the selection of the colors. As it is the case when laying tarot cards, it is inadvisable to repeat the color test too often because otherwise, the quality of the interpretation quickly fades.

So "accuracy" testing is not encouraged.

 

[Mal7]

If the accuracy primarily refers to "current state of mind", then to gauge the accuracy of the test, one could write down what one feels in the moment before choosing the colors. Then one can see how much match was there between one's own report and the color report.

I think that would start to defeat the purpose of the test, in that it is supposed to tell you something interesting about yourself that you don't already know, or can't consciously access.

But still, even if out of a large sample of people in a blind experiment most did report to finding the real tests as being more accurate than fake, random tests, this wouldn't actually be a finding that the test is accurate in all of its details, but only that people thought it was accurate. The real tests could perform well in the "which feels more accurate?" experiment based on general associations like bright yellow = happy, confident; while many of the details supplied in the results could really have no predictive power and just be part of the Forer/Barnum effect.

 

[PERLOU]

Comme en toute chose il faut en prendre et en laisser...

As in all things we must give and take ...

 

[3DStudent]

Hmm, regarding the accuracy, initially I had a strong reaction and felt my results were pretty spot on. It still rings true a few weeks later.

I wonder if there is an actual amount of information in colors? I mean, doesn't each correspond to a certain wavelength, which is a number measured in nanometers? In that aspect, it can be like numerology.

Even if inaccurate I think it's still effective in making you think. That's how the Tarot works, right? They're like an interface into your unconscious. If you needed to test the accuracy you could have someone try choosing the colors blindly without seeing them, or asking them to pick among this grid of a number of colors they are not shown. Then see if it has more meaning than when being able to view the colors.

 

[Buddy]

I think the issue here is simple, though not necessarily simple for me to describe.

My beginning assumptions:

1) That our frontal cortex with its narrative capability is trained to think by default about 'things'. 'Things' that may or may not be related.
2) That our emotional mind, body-mind, inductive mind, or whatever one wants to call it, is mainly concerned with relationship without regard to the relata and that it is our active responsibility to ensure the two converge appropriately. Ex: notice the height difference between two specific people and then notice that your ability to notice that has nothing to do with those specific people. The ratio is the same for any two people of that same height.

Other possible examples would explain how people can make wrong associations that lead to dysfunctional thinking patterns due to errors where the narrative has assigned the wrong relata to the currently felt relationship. Laura covers a lot of this by implication in the Addiction chapter of the online Wave.

With the above in mind, it's pretty easy to see that there are 'traits' associated with colors, the question really is more about: are these associations real and is this partiular color-trait relationship YOU.

That there is, in all our minds, connections between color and some kind of 'trait' is fairly noticable because we have all been exposed since birth to colors as others have connected them to gender, personality, etc. and we have absorbed all that. From the cartoons and picture books to Anne Rice novels, there have been colors and color themes associated, sometimes illogically, with aspects of our world that both correspond naturally and in man-made ways.

Ever since neuroscience has discovered that we can make a decision to act .5 seconds before we are consciously aware of our decision to do so, the implications have been made that a part of us can easily "read ahead" of what we are focused on. In such a case, our opinion of how accurate the color oracle is could already be evaluated and decided on based on stored associations and what we 'know' before we even realize what that decision was and then we think we are actually 'deciding' on this fact in the here and now (when it's really after-the fact).

Another possibility here is that a person is simply telling the extent to which he is thinking and feeling as a product of his culture and environment as that relates to his degree of consciousness and being ATM.

My opinions only and those could just as well be half-baked. :)

 

[obyvatel]

[quote author=3D Student]
Even if inaccurate I think it's still effective in making you think. That's how the Tarot works, right? They're like an interface into your unconscious.
[/quote]

Yes, that makes sense. There could be thoughts and feelings which are hazy and have not yet accumulated enough "charge" to cross the barrier from the unconscious into conscious awareness. In such cases, there are various tools which can help us consolidate these vague impressions into more coherent images. This test could be used as such a tool.

When used in this way, some of the general descriptions provided by the test would resonate with an individual. It is not about "accuracy" of the test, but its usefulness as a tool to bring some vague and hazy psychological content into clearer focus. The results are subjective and particular to the individual. To get better results then, one could start with a higher than normal level of intensity or arousal of the psyche - like a burning issue or a question (like in I-Ching).

 

[John G]

With the above in mind, it's pretty easy to see that there are 'traits' associated with colors...

Yeah one could see for example bright colors associated with excitement seeking. Then they would need to mute the effect a little if the choice is made late in the test. A trait like excitement seeking could be associated with your normal healthy personality bias or it could be some unhealthy marker for your normal personality. Personality tests in general work better for some than others and this one could really have problems; you could for example like a color due to its association with a favorite sports team.

 

[Buddy]

...you could for example like a color due to its association with a favorite sports team.

Indeed and you could map a hypothetical perceptual flow thusly:

Today, you've lived through years of color schemes - many natural and many man-made. You've watched a lot of TV and movies. You've seen Stanley Kubrick movies but didn't notice the consistency in his scene color choices and how he uses them to foreshadow events (as just one example). All this has passed into memory, along with the characteristics of the plot and surrounding story.

Today, you've been ruminating and "your situation" resembles one a character in a movie once dealt with and you may have similar "feelings" in stimulation as those which the characters acted out or that you had as a passive spectator.

So now a test says to pick the color you find the most pleasing right now. "Most pleasing" is subjective and ambiguous enough that an unconscious search for your "most pleasing" color at this moment calls up the one that is closest to your liminal threshold of awareness. The Oracle's programming contains general descriptions related to these colors and color schemes, so all it has to do is report, in general statements, what is generally associated with those colors in your culture (if it knows your culture) and Bam! there you go! At least as an accepted frame which your mind can fill in to make sure details are in agreement as necessitated by the validation already going on in the mind.

It's possible, I think.

 

[David]

Maybe it just boils down to the lies we tell ourselves... even the guys who developed the oracle, and maybe if theres any probability or statistical stuff on associations and what not going on, it might just reflect a statistical deviation in the lies we tell ourselves... and where chance/probability can sometimes reinforcing them.

Then again I can often suffer some form of ‘Confirmation bias’ - looking for what I think, I know... and even though not really finding any objective facts, just forming the above based on some bias or known human error of reasoning, making it all the harder... no wonder authoritarians exist, it’s just much easier to believe a lie, and not expending the effort even to consider possibilities... or just reality. I’m rambling...

Where is Daniel Kahneman when you need him... maybe he can shed some light... from Thinking Fast and Slow

System 1 (automatic) registers the cognitive ease with which it processes information, but it dose not generate a warning signal when it becomes unreliable. Intuitive answers come to mind quickly and confidently, whether they originate from skills or from heuristics. There is no simple way for system 2 to distinguish between a skill and a heuristic response. Its only recourse is to slow down and attempt to construct an answer on its own, which it is reluctant to do because it is indolent. Many suggestions of System 1 are casually endorsed with minimal checking, as in the bat-and-ball problem. This is how System 1 acquires it’s bad reputation as the source of errors and biases. It’s operative features, which include WYSIATI, intensity matching, and associative coherence, among others, give rise to predictable biases and to cognitive illusions such as anchoring, nonregressive predictions, overconfidence, and numerous others

 

[mabar]

After reading your post and followings ... I think that, I fell in the "trap" of semantics, my mistake, perhaps I should had add the adverb "almost" or explain better.
Thanks all for your posts. :)

If the accuracy primarily refers to "current state of mind", then to gauge the accuracy of the test, one could write down what one feels in the moment before choosing the colors. Then one can see how much match was there between one's own report and the color report.

That would had become more difficult to me, "write down what I feel" before... When I feel "weird" like something is off balance, but cannot pin point out what it is, I tend to discard the obvious, around the time I took the color test combined with reading the anxious thread ... it was as if my issues were ... delineated. From being confuse and diffused they (the issues) took more form, of course, it does not match with the word "accuracy/accurate", I learned after looking at the dictionaries (english-spanish, english-english and synonymous/antonymous) apart of reading the posts. :P

So now a test says to pick the color you find the most pleasing right now. "Most pleasing" is subjective and ambiguous enough that an unconscious search for your "most pleasing" color at this moment calls up the one that is closest to your liminal threshold of awareness. The Oracle's programming contains general descriptions related to these colors and color schemes, so all it has to do is report, in general statements, what is generally associated with those colors in your culture (if it knows your culture) and Bam! there you go! At least as an accepted frame which your mind can fill in to make sure details are in agreement as necessitated by the validation already going on in the mind.

yeap, more or less happend to me.

 

[HowToBe]

[The posts I'm quoting here have been pared down to relevant sections for brevity.]

Yeah, mine was pretty accurate too. But I wonder what our reactions would be if we could read all possible responses. Would there be some that simply do NOT fit our current situation? Or would they also apply to us, on the whole? In other words, is the 'pool' of responses catered towards applying to a wide section of people, so that the chances are that any collection of responses will seem to apply to that person individually?

This was what I though of as well, having learned at some point about the effect obyvatel mentioned via a Youtube video:

Since this is posted in the Psychology & Cognitive Science Board .........


Forer/Barnum effect

Good to know the proper name of that. Thanks to obyvatel naming the effect I was able to find the video. Here you can see a few groups of people being fooled by this effect into thinking they have received very personal, unique, and insightful feedback when they actually all were given the exact same "reading":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si2HoscBLIw

http://<iframe width="560" height="...Iw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

This is suggestive of what Mal7 said here:

But still, even if out of a large sample of people in a blind experiment most did report to finding the real tests as being more accurate than fake, random tests, this wouldn't actually be a finding that the test is accurate in all of its details, but only that people thought it was accurate. The real tests could perform well in the "which feels more accurate?" experiment based on general associations like bright yellow = happy, confident; while many of the details supplied in the results could really have no predictive power and just be part of the Forer/Barnum effect.

In short, it doesn't seem that "it feels/seems accurate" is a safe ruler to use when it comes to these sort of tests. If you watch the video, you can see how excited and emotionally moved the subjects of the experiment become, even though it's a trick, and is not truly providing them with any personally unique information. This trick is used by fake psychics, horoscopes, and fake psychological quizzes. It also reminds me of Redirect, due to the way that all of those social interventions that Timothy Wilson shows to have been failures all "seemed" like an "accurate" solution to the various problems like teen pregnancies, college drinking, drug and alcohol use, etc. even though they actually did nothing or made things worse! It doesn't mean these tests and tools can't be useful, just that we must be critical of our impressions and feelings about their accuracy.

The following sums up my thoughts about much of the validity of things like I-Ching, tests such as these, astrology, and so forth:

[quote author=3D Student]
Even if inaccurate I think it's still effective in making you think. That's how the Tarot works, right? They're like an interface into your unconscious.

Yes, that makes sense. There could be thoughts and feelings which are hazy and have not yet accumulated enough "charge" to cross the barrier from the unconscious into conscious awareness. In such cases, there are various tools which can help us consolidate these vague impressions into more coherent images. This test could be used as such a tool.

When used in this way, some of the general descriptions provided by the test would resonate with an individual. It is not about "accuracy" of the test, but its usefulness as a tool to bring some vague and hazy psychological content into clearer focus. The results are subjective and particular to the individual. To get better results then, one could start with a higher than normal level of intensity or arousal of the psyche - like a burning issue or a question (like in I-Ching).
[/quote]

In other words, it seems that maybe these tests and similar tools do not "feel or seem accurate" and give us personal insights because they contain any special information about you or me personally, but because they contain information that applies to most humans in general. Although I'm not well-versed in the topic, it seems from what I've read that the I-Ching is perhaps the most pure example of this that exists today. You form a question, get a (theoretically) random answer, but this answer contains high-level, valid information (Truth) about the human condition overall that can serve as a catalyst for your unconscious to crystallize a useful response or narrative around.

If the unconscious mind is the soul, then a tool like this is perhaps like a focuser or tuner that helps the soul to communicate its information in a way that's useful to the conscious mind. That is, IF the "tuner" (be it an I-Ching translation, astrology book, horoscope, tarot, etc.) truly does contain high-level information of this kind. I would guess that different sources may contain different levels. The tricky part is that rather than quality information of this type, some tools may use a twisted view of reality or tell us what we want to hear, possibly causing a bad crystallization and helping us to form skewed, harmful, or useless narratives instead of the insights that might aid us. And that's not to mention how our own biases and blockages might cause problems with receiving quality insights/information even from a high quality source.

So, we must remember to take things with a grain of salt. (Sodium is important, after all! ;) )

And here's a comment I left on that Youtube video to sum up:

I suspect that people often miss an important message that we can take from the Barnum/Forer Effect: The questions really evoke the wishes, feelings, and struggles which most of us share as human beings. These "tricks" work by taking advantage of the fact that we think we are more alone in our hopes and feelings than we really are.

If you think about it, you may find some inspiration there to see your fellow humans in a different light. At least the ones that aren't trying to lie, cheat, steal, and kill by fooling us with bogus tests and other sophisticated tricks, a la politics and marketing, etc... They are the minority, but a powerful and dangerous one.

So those are my thoughts, and not meant to exclude the possibility of some tools being able to provide useful and truly personalized information.

(By the way, hi everyone, long time no post! )

 

[cubbex]

The results of the test might be defined by applying these... how do they call them in english? attitude scales? tons of questions and a spectrum of preferences, then you create the program and that's it.

All these tests make you feel like a hero or a particular individual that cannot be repeated, I still want to find a test that points out all your negative aspects, your errors, you assumptions, things like that. It would be ohsum.

 

[Buddy]

All these tests make you feel like a hero or a particular individual that cannot be repeated, I still want to find a test that points out all your negative aspects, your errors, you assumptions, things like that. It would be ohsum.

You might be interested in the book You Are Worthless: Depressing Nuggets of Wisdom Sure to Ruin Your Day available on Amazon. It's the self-help book from hell. You won't even need to bother with a test.