Question: do think astorlogy is 100% correct?

Emily Mattacola answered on 12 Nov 2019:

Unfortunately, astrology doesn’t have any evidence to say that it’s correct. When you think about this, it makes logical sense that it’s not true, as otherwise there would only be 12 different types of people! It’d mean that everyone born in the same period would have the same personality, and the same things happening to them, as we know that that’s just not the case. People are way more complex than being able to reduce them down into these quite restrictive categories.

Horoscopes can seem really accurate and specifically designed for you because they exploit something called the Barnum effect (sometimes also seen as the Forer effect). Forer gave his introductory psychology class of 39 students a personality test. A week later, he gave each student a ‘personality sketch’ containing 14 sentences he said summed them up. He then asked the students to rate the sketch’s accuracy on a scale of 1 to 5. They gave it an average of 4.3. But, they’d all read the exact same sketch. Phrases that sound specific to you but are actually applicable to lots of people are called Barnum statements, named after entertainer P T Barnum, whose life was the inspiration behind the film The Greatest Showman.

The key feature of a Barnum statement is that it’s sufficiently vague for anyone to be able to find meaning in it. A form of cognitive bias called subjective validation can then come into play, and make you think of the statement as true to you, without considering that it could be equally true of most other people. Your brain has a tendency to attach personal meaning to things, and discard anything that doesn’t fit, is something that astrologists and psychics rely on to convince people they know more than they really do.