Are the stars truly concealing the secrets of your future and personality? A team of scientists asked themselves, and how they set about discovering this was as rigorous as it was insightful. Collaborating with amateur and professional astrologers, they built a challenge that extended well beyond the horoscope briefs many of us write off as “tabloid astrology.” This was a full-bore test with complete birth charts those detailed maps of planetary configurations at the moment of birth that astrologers claim can expose profound truths about an individual’s personality and fate.
The design was simple but demanding. To begin with, the researchers collected real people’s life outcomes of some detail like career satisfaction, romantic satisfaction, spiritual activism, political ideology, and personal accomplishments. They used statistical techniques, here linear regression, to see if zodiac signs would forecast these life outcomes. The key measure was the correlation coefficient, or “r,” which is a number that shows the degree to which two variables are associated. The result? Sun signs were no more accurate at forecasting life events than chance. In fact, when the group re-ran the analysis with randomly assigned zodiac signs, the result was practically identical.
Without showing their hand, the researchers then invited astrologers to play a matching game. Both were given a real person’s self-answered personality data questionnaire-style answers to things like “How would you define your personality?” and “What material thing do you most value?” along with five birth charts, one of which was the test subject’s. The task: guess correctly. The astros were feeling optimistic; more than half of them believed they’d done better than average.
But the numbers did not agree.
As the research chronicled, “Not a single astrologer got more than 5 of the 12 correct, though more than half of astrologers reported… that they believed they had gotten more than 5 correct.” Experience was no help either old hands at it were no better than novices. This inaccuracy-confidence gap is not an exception in astrology. Psychologists have long recorded the Barnum effect, in which individuals accept vague generalities as uniquely descriptive of themselves. P.T. Barnum’s masterful ability to create such statements is the reason they are named after him.
Phrases such as You sometimes like to be by yourself, but there are times when you like being around people sound intimate but are so general they could be used to describe anybody. We are programmed to seek out patterns and connections where perhaps there are none, and this makes us especially susceptible to believing flattering or affirmable predictions. Astrology’s ability to withstand decades of scientific discrediting also stems from deeper psychological needs. As one author described it, many modern-day fans don’t so much see it as a science as a technique of self-examination, a way of seeing the problems and possibilities of existence. In times of uncertainty, the shape and symbolism of astrology can offer a illusion of control an comforting ballast when the future is unclear. It can be especially appealing in stressful times, when having “something to hang your hat on” is better than doing nothing with the unknown.
And there’s a flip side to this.
That same illusion can also lead us to make poor decisions like missing out on a great opportunity or delaying action because “the stars aren’t aligned,” says psychologist Kate Sweeny at the University of California, Riverside.
She advocates more realistic approaches to uncertainty, such as mindfulness practices that keep the mind centered in the here and now, or engaging in activities that create a “flow” state those complete absorption experiences when the passing of time disappears, whether it is minding a garden, cooking dinner, or even playing a game on a computer. The new test doesn’t reduce the cultural or personal worth of astrology to practitioners, but it does distinguish between belief and measurable precision. For the skeptical, it is a reminder that assertions of the extraordinary require evidence of the extraordinary sort and that perhaps the freest way to respond to “What’s going to happen?” is simply, “I don’t know, and that’s okay.”
