Comparative Education Bulletin - Faculty of Education - The ...

Does Third Culture Theory Suffer from the Fallacy of
Subjective Personal Validation?
Miriam Hasofer
In the 1950s, John and Ruth Hill Useem conducted ethnographic
research about expatriates living and working in India. They proceeded
to define the home culture of these expatriates as the ‘First Culture’,
their host culture as the ‘Second Culture’ and the shared lifestyle of
the expatriate community, the ‘Third Culture’. The Useems referred to
the children growing up in the Third Culture as ‘Third Culture Kids’
(TCKs) (Useem et al. 1993, p.1). Pollock later adapted the definition of
‘TCKs’ to fit with social and communal global changes affecting ‘Third
Culture’. He proceeded to define a TCK as ‘a person who has spent a
significant part of his or her development years outside the parents’
culture’ (Pollock, 2003, p.19). With the advent of globalisation and the
rise in numbers of expatriates and Third Culture Kids, there seems to
be a greater need for people to authenticate their cultural belonging,
and therefore, there is a large, ready market for those promoting such
mechanisms of self-validation.
Pollock and van Reken’s book, Third Culture Kids: The Experience of
Growing Up Among Worlds, has achieved such mainstream publishing
popularity that in 2003 it had gone into its third reprint. One chapter of
the book is dedicated to assigning TCKs one of four generic personality
types, while other chapters are devoted to the experiences, challenges
and benefits facing TCKs and Adult TCKs (ATCKs). In my opinion,
it is fair to say that all parts of the book were ultimately written with
the aim of assisting TCKs and ATCKs to validate their past and find a
sense of cultural belonging.
However, psychologists (Dickson and Kelly, 1985) tend to question
potential mechanisms of self-validation with reference to the wellknown
‘Fallacy of Subjective Personal Validation’ (Forer 1949). In
the late 1940s, psychologist Bertram R. Forer found that people tend
to accept general personality descriptions as uniquely applicable
to themselves without realizing that the same description could be
applied to just about anyone. Still today, people tend to accept claims
about themselves in proportion to their desire that the claims be true,
rather than in proportion to the empirical accuracy of the claims. A
common explanation given to account for this ‘Fallacy of Subjective
Personal Validation’, (also known as the ‘Forer Effect’ or the ‘Barnum
Effect’ 1 ), is the human tendency to try and make sense out of our past
Based on the famous quote ‘There’s a sucker born every minute’, sometimes attributed
to the circus showman Phineas Taylor (P.T.) Barnum.
29