Classtrology

On this page we will try to give you some interesting, objective testresults about the sense of astrology.

• Evidence and testing
• Our analysis of daily horoscopes

EVIDENCE AND TESTING

People who do not believe in astrology often have the same argument: "It hasn't been proved" or "Magazine horoscopes are too vague, too general and they could apply to everyone". These arguments are based on personal opinions though. Only scientific experiments can evaluate the accuracy of such opinions. There are three kinds of experiments possible:
The first test checks if the (descriptive as in not predictive) horoscopes indeed apply to anyone: On the one hand this can be tested by giving people a number of different horoscopes and asking them to pick their own or on the other hand by presenting the same horoscope to a lot of people and testing how many it fits. Serious astrologers would agree that newspaper columns are rubbish. However, the same test produces the same result with serious personal horoscope readings by astrologers.
The second test examines the fundamental thesis of astrology - that "the position of the planets (all planets, the Sun and Moon plus other objects defined by astrologers) at the moment of birth can be used to determine the subject's general personality traits and tendencies in temperament and behavior, and to indicate the major issues the subject is likely to encounter" (Skeptics website). The procedure consists of tabulating the data for lots of people.
Thirdly, one can gather the predictions made by astrologers where they are explicit, and see what proportion comes true.

Here are some of the formal tests that have been made:

In 1971 the Survey Research Centre of the University of California, Berkeley sampled 1000 adults in the bay area getting information on natal signs and lots of attributes claimed by astrology to correspond. For instance, Leos are supposed to have good leadership qualities. An analysis by Ralph Bastedo found no correlation for leadership, political stand, intelligence, belief in astrology, musical ability, artistic ability, confidence, creativity, occupation, religion, ability to make friends, to organise or to feel deeply. This showed that these tendencies do not differ between signs, so natal signs cannot be used to predict personality traits.

In 1979 Michel Gauquelin put an advertisement in Ici-Paris offering a free horoscope. Recipients were asked to reply saying how accurate they and their friends found the horoscope. Of the first 150 replies, 94% percent said it was accurate as did 90% of their friends and family. Unfortunately, they all got the same horoscope, that of Dr. Petiot, a notorious mass murderer.

In 1982 Australian Skeptics collected thirteen newspaper horoscope columns for the last week of August, rated them for good, bad and vague predictions about News, Health and Luck; Relationships; Finance and Travel. They found very little consistency, in fact most signs had a fairly even spread so, for instance, you could find one paper telling you it would be a lucky week and another saying the opposite. This shows that newspaper horoscopes are essentially random.

In 1985, Harry Edwards checked all the predictions from Old Moore's Almanack for 1984. These were written by a couple of top astrologers. Of the 200 predictions it was possible to check, less than 5% materialized and practically all of those could have been based solely on probability, prior knowledge or astute speculation. Astrologers are no better than pastry cooks, taxi drivers or any of us at predicting.

In 1985, at the University of California, Berkeley, Shawn Carlson designed a test in conjunction with a number of America's top Astrologers to test the fundamental thesis of natal astrology. Considerable effort was spent ensuring that all parties were happy with the experiments beforehand. In the first experiment, people in a test group were given three horoscopes, one of which was theirs, and asked to rate them for fit. A control group, matched for sun-sign, was given the same horoscopes. The astrologers said the test group should pick their own horoscope at least 50% of the time but both groups did no better than chance. This showed that people can't identify their own horoscope and find any horoscope satisfactory. In a second experiment participating astrologers were asked to match horoscopes with corresponding personality inventory tests. Again the astrologers did no better than chance. This shows that horoscopes do not predict personality.

On June 7, 1989, on American television, James Randi offered $100,000 to any psychic or Astrologer who could prove the truth of their claims. An astrologer who took up the challenge was given the birth information of twelve people and had cast their charts. He interviewed the twelve without knowing who was whom and was to identify them by matching them with horoscopes. He got none right.

In 1994, Melbourne's Sunday Age asked half a dozen astrologers and psychics to predict the winner of the Melbourne cup. None of them came close.

Finally, Michel Gauquelin created a long running affair, starting in the late 60s, called the Mars effect with some research that looked very promising for astrology.
He collected enormous amounts of data from catalogues of famous people ending up with data for thousands of sporting champions, scientists, actors and writers. He found statistically significant correlations between the birth of sports champions and the position of Mars, between actors and Jupiter, between scientists and Saturn and between journalists and Moon. This shouldn't have been too much encouragement because it was only four planets, only four professions, and only for the top couple of percent of those professions. He found no correlations at all for any planet with random samples.
Because of the enormous amount of data it was difficult to reproduce and one attempt at refuting it boiled into a scandal where doubt was cast on the credibility of the refuters. Eventually, a French group, with Gauquelin's cooperation, set up another test of over a thousand sports champions and found a negative result. Gauquelin then argued that some of the champions weren't champions at all and that several other champions had been missed and should have been included. Needless to say these changes produced a positive result but are clearly post-hoc data manipulation introducing bias.

With permission from http://www.skeptics.com.au/journal/astrol.htm

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OUR ANALYSIS OF DAILY HOROSCOPES

Most people perceive astrology as the short messages that appear periodically in magazines and on the Internet. Those horoscopes tend to be very diffuse and general. They also differ from magazine to magazine. We consider them to be the main reason for disbelief in astrology. That is why we decided to analyse periodical horoscopes: We question whether they are really that diffuse and general, and wonder whether or not different websites offer different horoscopes?

For our analysis we used the daily horoscope published on three websites on the 26th of February 2002. We took the most important elements of the horoscopes and placed them in a table in order to give a good overview (see table below).
Looking at the results, the differences between the three versions is immediately clear, although there are some similarities between the first two versions. Cancer, for example, is warned about stubbornness in both versions. It is possible that those versions are based on the same theory or technique. All versions remain very vague and superficial. Predictions like ‘You are in a good mood today’ do not really say anything concrete about our near future. But this vagueness of astrologers can be a trick to avoid criticism. Such astrologers claim they can only predict a direction in which your ones life is developing. There are too many other elements that can have an influence on ones life, therefore it is impossible to make concrete predictions.

It seems as if our colleagues have expressed good reasons to be very sceptical about this form of astrology. But this really cannot be a reason for disbelief in astrology as a whole. Astrology is more complicated than those few magazine assumptions and titillations. People who are interested in their horoscope feel the need for a concrete translation of a very complicated science, but by doing so they simplify astrology. At that point it loses every sense of credibility.

Of course we were not the first to test the credibility of horoscopes. You can find some interesting testresults above.

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Sources :
http://horoscope.tiscali.be/
http://www.telegraaf.nl/krant/astrolink/teksten/astro.index.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/choice/horoscopes/

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