More recent research, published in the October issue of the Journal of Consumer Research , found that people who read a negative horoscope were more likely to indulge in impulsive or self-indulgent behavior soon after.
Why are people willing to re-order their love lives, buy a lottery ticket, or a take a new job based on the advice of someone who knows nothing more about them than their birthdate? One reason we can rule out is scientific validity. Of all the empirical tests that have been done on astrology, in all fields, says Dr. For example, in a study published in the journal Nature , Dr. A study out in , conducted by former astrologer Dr.
Geoffrey Dean and psychologist Dr. Ivan Kelly, tracked the lives of 2, subjects who were all born within minutes of one another over several decades.
The theory was that if astrological claims about star position and birthdates were true, then the individuals would have shared similar traits; they did not.
But despite a preponderance of scientific evidence to suggest that the stars do not influence our lives — and even personally demonstrable evidence such as that financial windfall your horoscope told you to expect on the eighth of the month failed to materialize — people continue to believe. Forer gave his students a personality test, followed by a description of their personality that was supposedly based on the results of the test.
In reality, there was only ever one description, cobbled together from newspaper horoscopes, and everyone received the same one. Part of what was happening was that the descriptions were positive enough, without being unbelievably positive:. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. Fatedness runs counter to our modern notion of free will, and therefore many find traditional astrology unpalatable. However, we do not need to believe in a fatalistic view of planetary movements to revive some insights in the work of the ancient astrologers who espoused them.
Now, modern psychology can enrich those parts of the astrological tradition. Her writing carries strong feminist and social-justice overtones, hitting on the zeitgeist of the moment not unlike what Alan Leo did in his time over a century ago. Her audience is devoted and growing, with a regular readership reaching over 1 million people. While people can now preach openly about crystals or sound-vibration healing and only get a single eye roll, those who look to astrology for answers are still in the proverbial closet.
The revival of traditional astrology is still in its early days. As with most discoveries from antiquity, it takes time to integrate findings into existing knowledge. Take the Antikythera mechanism for example, the earliest known analog computer that dates from the Hellenistic period.
Astrology is a practice. It only comes alive through use. Traditional astrology, with its wealth of ancient texts, deserves the same respectful suspension of disbelief as other old-world scientific fields. The first step? Leaving the conceits of modern psychology behind. By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy.
Skip to navigation Skip to content. Discover Membership. Editions Quartz. The ivory itself likely came from an elephant that was killed or otherwise died around that time, they suspect. Being a valuable item, the ivory would have been stored for several decades, or even a century, before it was used to construct the zodiac.
These signs would then have been attached to a flat possibly wooden surface to create the board, which may have included other elements that didn't survive. At some point it may have been put on a ship heading through the Adriatic Sea , an important route for commerce that the cave overlooks. The people who lived in Croatia at the time were called Illyrians. Although ancient writers tended to have a low opinion of them, archaeological evidence suggests that they interacted with nearby Greek colonies and were very much a part of the Mediterranean world.
It's possible that an astrologer from one of the Greek colonies came to the cave to give a prediction. A consultation held in the flickering light of the cavern would have been a powerful experience, although perhaps not very convenient for the astrologer. Another possibility is that the Illyrians traded for or stole the astrology board from someone, not fully understanding what it was used for.
The results of hundreds of tests are all the same: there is no evidence that natal astrology has any predictive power, even in a statistical sense. Why, then, do people often seem to have anecdotes about how well their own astrologer advised them? Effective astrologers today use the language of the zodiac and the horoscope only as the outward trappings of their craft.
Mostly they work as amateur therapists, offering simple truths that clients like or need to hear. Recent studies have shown that just about any sort of short-term therapy makes people feel a little better because the very act of talking about our problems with someone who listens attentively is, in itself, beneficial. The scheme of astrology has no basis in scientific fact, however; at best, it can be described as a pseudoscience. It is an interesting historical system, left over from prescientific days and best remembered for the impetus it gave people to learn the cycles and patterns of the sky.
From it grew the science of astronomy, which is our main subject for discussion. In response to modern public interest in astrology, scientists have carried out a wide range of statistical tests to assess its predictive power.
The simplest of these examine sun sign astrology to determine whether—as astrologers assert—some signs are more likely than others to be associated with some objective measure of success, such as winning Olympic medals, earning high corporate salaries, or achieving elective office or high military rank.
You can devise such a test yourself by looking up the birth dates of all members of Congress, for example, or all members of the U. Olympic team. Are our political leaders somehow selected at birth by their horoscopes and thus more likely to be Leos, say, than Scorpios?
You do not even need to be specific about your prediction in such tests. After all, many schools of astrology disagree about which signs go with which personality characteristics. To demonstrate the validity of the astrological hypothesis, it would be sufficient if the birthdays of all our leaders clustered in any one or two signs in some statistically significant way.
Dozens of such tests have been performed, and all have come up completely negative: the birth dates of leaders in all fields tested have been found to be distributed randomly among all the signs.
In a fine example of such a test, two statisticians examined the reenlistment records of the United States Marine Corps. We suspect you will agree that it takes a certain kind of personality not only to enlist, but also to reenlist in the Marines.
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