Unless you have been living under Mercury in retrograde, you’re probably familiar with astrology: the study of how the planets, stars, and constellations affect your life on Earth.
For diehard believers, astrology warns of difficulties in the future and predicts your ultimate destiny. Viewed through this lens, astrology is a roadmap to your future.
Essentially, astrology is purportedly the biggest spoiler ever.
Stars and strikes?
So, is astrology all stars or a few strikes when predicting and understanding the average person’s personality? There are quite a few strikes against astrology as an accurate predictor of personality traits.
In 1990, researcher Van Rooij asked over 400 adults to indicate how well certain statements applied to them. The statements were chosen from the verbiage typically found in horoscopes. For example, “impulsive” is often associated with Aries, while “versatile” describes Gemini.
Van Rooij found partial statistical significance for some of the people to validate a link between self-concept and astrology.
But the correlation only applied to participants who had already been familiar with their astrological personality characteristics before they became a part of this study.
In other words, if a participant fell under the sign of the conservative Taurus and they had already been aware that astrology identifies Taurus as an unusually conservative sign, they were more likely to self-identify as conservative.
Andersson et al.’s 2022 article found a link between high levels of narcissism and belief in your astrological sign, as well as low levels of intelligence. People who are more narcissistic are literally more likely to believe that the sun revolves around them. People who are less intelligent are also more likely to believe in astrology.
To date, no scientifically valid study has found conclusive support for a significant connection between astrology and personality.
Astrology is not quite a science
Astrology sounds scientific because of the “ology” but is better identified as pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is well-defined by Space.com as having the “skin” of science from the outside: It seems to look like science from a quick outside point of view.
But if you try to look for the true components of science in astrology, you will likely be disappointed.
Astrology fails to stand up to three pivotal tests of science:
- Test-Retest Reliability: Repeated tests of astrology from different groups of people do not produce the same results.
- Statistical Reliability: Numbers rule out the likelihood that the findings are more likely to occur rather than these findings occurring repeatedly by coincidence.
- Peer Review: Other scientists in the field agree that this looks like a legitimate and easily understood conclusion from the data.
In short, you can’t make the same results occur multiple times; the numbers don’t establish a likely and dependable outcome, and other scientists don’t agree with the conclusion originally established.
A 1984 study by Tyson had five different astrologers read the charts of 15 subjects. Each subject brought a close friend or family member to the study. The goal of the study attempted to parse out three different questions:
- To identify whether interrater reliability could be established (did each astrologer read the same thing from the subject’s chart)
- Did the Big Five Personality Test, a well-documented instrument that identifies the traits of extraversion vs. introversion, organized vs. careless, friendly vs. reserved, neuroticism (sensitive vs. resilient), and open vs. closed to new experience identify the same personality traits as the astrologist’s charts did?
- Could the subject pick out their chart from all of the other subject’s charts?
- Could the subject’s friend or family member identify the subject from their chart alone? (Almost like the blind taste test of Coke versus Pepsi.)
The results were clear.
There was high interrater reliability amongst the astrologers (they saw the same thing when reading the subject’s chart).
But equally clear was two-fold: First, an individual’s responses on the Big Five Personality traits were not linked to their astrological sign. Second, the subject’s friends and/or family members were unable to identify the subject’s chart as belonging to the subject.
Personality Essential Reads
Nothing looked familiar or made anyone think, “Huh, that sounds exactly like Rita.”
And still, horoscopes are included in every major women’s magazine.
Is Pseudo-Profound BullSh*t to blame?
In 2024, an article came out titled “What if some people just do not like science?” Researchers once again used the Big Five Personality Traits, but this time, they attempted to correlate these traits with attitudes toward science.
This study found that people who are less open to different experiences and people who have higher levels of anxiety are less likely to believe new science versus old ideas.
Perhaps people reject ideas that conflict with their personal belief system or have some reason in their past to make them distrust the large universities where research is often birthed.
Humorously, a 2015 study by Gordan Pennycook introduced the concept of “pseudo-profound bullshit” to refer to how people perceive statements that sound like deep, meaningful statements but are actually devoid of meaning. For example, “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena” or “Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty.” This 2015 study paved the way for many other researchers to investigate pseudo-profound BS.
A scientifically significant correlation between those who believe pseudo-profound BS was found.
People who think they are smarter than they are and think other people are less smart than they are were found to endorse these empty statements that sound deep and meaningful. These people were also more likely to rate their creativity as being higher than it was and less likely to give to charity.
The verbiage of your average magazine horoscope often sounds remarkably similar to pseudo-profound BS—probably in an attempt to capture the attention of a large number of people through vague and relatable language.
Part of the problem with scientifically proving astrology is real may be as a result of the butchering of a chart reading turned into Pseudo-Profound Bullsh*t.
Conclusion
The truth is that believing in astrology isn’t harmful. But it isn’t helpful to hand your fate and future over to the stars.