Is astrology accurate? Reading horoscopes is a popular pastime, but is there any scientific evidence that they are accurate?
When you’re enticed by a familiar interruption and your willpower weakens, problems can occur.
Every day, up to 70 million Americans consult their horoscopes. At least, that’s what the American Federation of Astrologers claims. According to a Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life poll conducted twenty years ago, 25% of Americans believe that the positions of the stars and planets have an impact on our daily life. In 2012, the General Social Survey indicated that 34% of Americans think astrology is “extremely” or “kind of scientific,” with the percentage of individuals who think astrology is “not at all scientific” dropping from two-thirds to about half.
Astrology is the concept that astronomical phenomena, such as the stars over your head when you were born or the fact that Mercury is retrograde, have the potential to influence our daily lives and personality traits. Of course, this is distinct from astronomy, which is the scientific study of celestial objects, space, and the physics of the cosmos.
A particular facet of astrology, the foretelling of a person’s future or the provision of daily counsel via horoscopes, is gaining in popularity. The Cut, for example, recorded a 150 percent rise in horoscope page views in 2017 compared to 2016.
Clearly, a lot of people are trying to figure out how to read the stars for guidance. Understanding the positions of the stars is the foundation of astrology, which appears to be a scientific discipline in and of itself. Is there any scientific evidence that astrology has an impact on our personalities and lives?
But, since I still have five minutes of this six-minute podcast to fill, let’s take a look at how astrology has been put to the test.
to affect you, an alignment of the planets would not lead you to win the lottery for the simple reason that a literal alignment of the planets never happens in the real world.
Yes. But it has nothing to do with the horoscopes being right. Horoscopes make people feel better because of a psychological effect known as the placebo effect. The placebo effect is when the belief in a useless method actually makes a person feel better. It is the belief itself, and not the method, that causes the improvement. The placebo effect has been scientifically verified. If you give pills to ten sick patients containing only water, but tell them it is a powerful new drug that will help them, and then have ten sick patients not take the pills, then over time the patients taking pills will show better health. Because of the placebo effect, a new drug must not just be proven to make patients feel better. It must be proven to perform better than a placebo. In accurate medical experiments, the control group is not a collection of untreated patients. Rather, the control group is a collection of patients receiving a placebo. The placebo effect is the mechanism at work with astrology. Many people believe in astrology. When they read their horoscope and follow its advice, they feel better. But it is the belief itself and not the astrology that is making them feel better. Many pseudo-scientific treatmentsfrom crystal healing to homeopathyhelp people through the placebo effect. Believing in a treatment that does not actually do anything may help, but believing in a treatment that does is even better. Sticking to scientifically proven treatments gives you the benefit of the belief and the benefit of the treatment’s action. For instance, instead of reading your horoscope each morning, go for a walk. Exercise is proven to be good for body and mind, and your belief in its effect will also help you.
Topics:
astrology, astronomy, gravity, horoscope, placebo, placebo effect, sign, stars