All About Astrology

[Ian David]

Skeptoid #173
September 29, 2009
Podcast transcript
Listen http://skeptoid.com/audio/skeptoid-4173.mp3

Today I'd like to talk about a subject that's very silly at face value, so silly that anyone with any functional part of a brain laughs it off as childish and ridiculous: Astrology, the notion that the time of year you were born assigns you a zodiac sign, and that sign determines your personality, forecasts your future, and provides decision guidance. The problem is that laughing something off is not really following a very skeptical process, especially when you remember that a lot of important people (such as the late President Reagan) depend on it. It's appropriate to look at the basis of astrology to see if it has any scientific validity, but it's also appropriate to look at the real-world results to see if there might be some real effect due to a mechanism that's not yet known.

<snip>

And so, given that there is no detectable effect, you might feel inclined to ask astrologers how they were able to detect its existence themselves, to the point of making it their careers. Generally they'll say they know it's real because it works. Now, I don't want to get into the whole cognitive bias thing here about how people can fool themselves into thinking a metaphysical reading is real; so let's just stick with what we can test and see if astrology really does work.

I wanted to find out if people generally do have the traits that their zodiac signs say they should, and so I conducted an informal survey over Twitter. (To be responsible, I should stress that there was nothing scientific about the way this survey was conducted, and so its results can at best be considered interesting, and not scientific proof of anything.) I went out on the web and found widely available personality descriptions of the various zodiac signs. For example, the words describing a Sagittarius were generally positive, things that I felt most people would probably identify with. So I took the four phrases (optimistic and freedom-loving, jovial and good-humored, honest and straightforward, intellectual and philosophical) and asked people to assign a 0 to each if they felt it did not describe them at all, a 1 if they felt it somewhat described them, and a 2 if it described them very well. I added each person's points up to get a score from 0 to 8. Since these were generally positive traits, I bet that most people would come up with pretty high scores. The average score turned out to be 6.3, with a clear distribution shoved up to the high end of the graph. The average respondent considers himself a 79% match with the traits of Sagittarius.

More:
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4173#


See prior thread:

Skeptoid: Brian Dunning's Great Twitter Clusterfuck of 2009
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=247x26693