DOES ASTROLOGY ACTUALLY WORK?
Sidereal measurement uses the most accurate astronomy for your chart, while Tropical measurement (the most standard of modern Western Astrology) uses a fixed snapshot of the cosmos, which now in the 21st century is astronomically inaccurate.
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When most people look at their Sidereal chart compared to their Tropical chart, a majority of the placements they’ve come to know can shift by a whole sign as Tropical astrology is astronomically off by 24 degrees.An example is that if you born on April 1st, you would astronomically be a Sun in Pisces vs. a Sun in Aries. I know… what a big change, huh? (excerpted from the above article)
Western astrology is typically based on false assumptions about the position of the sun relative to constellations of stars in the sky:
RECENT EXPERIMENTS & STUDIES SHOW SUN-SIGN ASTROLOGY DOES NOT WORK
In our data Astrological sun signs had literally zero predictive ability across all 37 outcomes. The correlation coefficients, or ‘r values’, were all 0, meaning that the zodiac signs had no ability whatsoever to predict any of the 37 outcomes!
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Our study provides evidence that sun sign astrology does not make accurate predictions about any of a wide variety of aspects of people’s lives and, therefore, cannot be relied on as a method for developing accurate beliefs about those aspects. (excerpted from the above article)
Three recent studies (Sachs 1998, Castille 2004, Voas 2007) with a combined sample size of 27 million couples have failed to find the slightest evidence for sun sign effects, thus confirming the results of earlier studies (which are briefly reviewed). Studies of sun sign compatibility largely avoid the problems that plague the testing of individual signs, namely those due to demography (depending on place and country some months have more births than others) and astronomy (due to the Earth's elliptical orbit some signs have more days than others), which here generally cancel out. We follow the tests in some detail to see how huge samples can tease out apparent astrological effects only to find them explained by recording bias and other glitches in the data. Despite the giant magnifying glass of huge samples, no sun sign effects could be detected. ... In short, lonely hearts (and anybody else including astrologers) who worry about sun signs (and by extension astrology itself) are absolutely wasting their time.
The test, which remains publicly available so that anyone can use it to test their own astrology skills, consists of 12 multiple choice questions. For each question, participants are shown a great deal of information about one real person's life, reflecting real person’s answers to 43 different questions. These questions were chosen by asking astrologers what they would ask someone if they wanted to be able to accurately guess that person's astrological chart.
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Alongside this information about each real person, astrologers were shown 5 astrological charts. Only one of these was the real natal chart of that person (based on their birth date, time, and location), and the other four were "decoy" charts that were generated based on random dates, times, and locations. The astrologer’s task was to determine which one of these five charts is the real one. (excerpted from the above article)
In total, we tested 152 astrologers who believed they would do better than chance at the tasks we gave them ...
Someone guessing at random would, on average, only correctly answer 2.4 questions out of 12, whereas those astrologers in our study with the least experience believed they had gotten 5 right, on average (right after they completed all the tasks), and those with the most astrology expertise believed they had gotten 10 right, on average.
Despite their high-degree of confidence in their performance, astrologers as a group performed no better than chance - that is, their distribution of results closely resembled what you'd see if they had all been guessing at random. And the number of charts they matched correctly, on average, was not statistically significantly different than random guessing either.
Not a single astrologer got more than 5 out of 12 answers correct - even though, after completing the task, more than half of astrologers believed they had gotten more than 5 answers correct.
More experience with astrology had no statistically significant association with better performance, and the astrologers with the most experience didn't do any better than the rest. (excerpted from the above article)
The research revolution
Astrologers say the heavens reflect our destiny from the cradle to the grave. Could this be true? The question has been furiously debated for more than twenty centuries, but an answer has been possible only since the 1970s, when advances in relevant areas (astronomy, psychology, statistics, research design) and a decisive technology (home computers) led to a revolution in scientific research into astrology.
Hundreds of empirical studies
Before 1950 almost no empirical studies of astrology existed. But by 2000 over one hundred had appeared in psychology journals and four hundred in astrology journals, equivalent to about 200 man-years of scientific research. For 91 typical studies see Research results and for overviews see Meta-analyses, both under Doing Scientific Research. The findings have been clear and consistent whether obtained by astrologers or by scientists -- astrology has not contributed to human knowledge, it has failed hundreds of tests, it has no acceptable mechanism other than hidden persuaders (see below), and users do not usefully agree on basics such as which zodiac to use or even on what a given birth chart indicates. Today, for the first time in twenty centuries, we can say with some certainty that no, the heavens do not reflect our destiny. (excerpted from the above article)
Abstract -- Contains abstracts of 91 studies, most of them empirical, from four astrological research journals. ... At the time the first three journals were the world's only peer-review astrological journals devoted to scientific research, whereas Kosmos was more an astrological journal than a scientific research journal, hence the fewer abstracts. The abstracts are comprehensive, averaging 270 words (range 80 to 950), and are annotated with later information where necessary. Most are from 1980-2000 when scientific research into astrology was at its peak. ... They illustrate the topics then being investigated by astrologers and others, the immense labour that could be involved, the results that were invariably incommensurate with astrological claims, and the then intense scientific interest in astrology that (in view of the negative results) will most likely never arise again. (excerpted from the above article)
Projects about sun signs
Signs are the most researched topic in astrology with well over one hundred empirical studies. Most studies are simply counts of people born under various signs, but such counts are too contaminated by ordinary influences (astronomy, sampling, demography, age incidence) to mean anything. ...
The remaining studies, if adequately controlled against non-astrological influences, have invariably been negative. Signs are not only the most researched topic in astrology but are also the most disconfirmed. Signs are simply not valid, not even slightly. ... (excerpted from the above article)
Projects about serious astrology
The bad news is that many tests are difficult, time consuming, and have already been done. For example testing whether an astrologer can identify people from their charts has already been done in 54 studies, some of which took several years to complete. Overall 742 astrologers and more than 1400 charts were tested but the results showed no support for astrology. (The support shown by some early tests was later found to be an artifact of sampling.) Another 20 studies involving nearly 500 subjects tested whether people can pick their own chart reading but again the results showed no support for astrology. ... (excerpted from the above article)
Understanding Astrology: A critical review of a thousand empirical studies 1900-2020
Fifty years ago empirical studies (studies based on experiments) were the hardest things to find in astrology. There were only opinions. Today there are more than a thousand empirical studies hidden in a hundred journals and dozens of books, plus academic theses, conference reports, websites, unpublished studies, and little-known hard-to-find specialised collections. For the first time Understanding Astrology brings together ALL of these highly scattered studies -- not just the ones conveniently available or selected to prove a point -- and subjects them to rigorous critical thinking. It puts astrology under the microscope in a concise style free of waffle. ... (excerpted from the above article)
The double-blind experiment conducted by the noted astrophysicist and science communicator Jayant Narlikar should be viewed as a pioneering effort to test astrology in India. Narlikar, recipient of the Padm Vibhushan, India’s second highest civilian award, published the results of the test widely, including in an article in Skeptical Inquirer (Narlikar 2013). His research generated a lot of debate because it revealed that none of the astrologers could perform better than chance, 50 percent. However, as in many double-blind experiments, particularly when the outcome is negative, astrology’s supporters tried to create ambiguity by questioning whether the results were due to the limitations of astrology or the astrologers themselves. Against this backdrop, we present the results of new empirical tests of a few fundamental principles of Indian astrology, leveraging the same dataset that was used in Narlikar’s double-blind test. Interestingly enough, our results showed why Indian astrology failed the double-blind test. It is little wonder that other versions of astrology are found to fail on the same grounds. (excerpted from the above article)
These results explain why in double-blind tests of astrology in general—and in the 2008 test by Narlikar et al. in particular—none of the astrologers could hit a better success rate than 50 percent. In our view, though astrologers have their own sets of rules used for predictions, the rules are mostly based on the fundamental principles tested above. These principles do not act as a differentiator themselves, nor do they produce a differential negativity when they are summed up together. Hence, no one could achieve a success rate better than random chance. It is thus the limitation of astrology, and not of the astrologers, that astrology failed. (excerpted from the above article)
Our experiment with twenty-seven Indian astrologers judging forty horoscopes each, and a team of astrologers judging 200 horoscopes, showed that none were able to tell bright children from mentally handicapped children better than chance. Our results contradict the claims of Indian astrologers and areconsistent with the many tests of Western astrologers. In summary, our results are firmly against Indian astrology being considered as a science. (excerpted from the above article)
A RECENT STUDY SHOWS THAT NEITHER WESTERN NOR CHINESE ZODIAC SIGNS PREDICTS COVID OR COVID-CAUSED DEATH
Astrology once held a significant impact on beliefs in medicine and continues in Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine. Our study utilized local data to determine if COVID-19 infection rates and mortality might have a relationship to astrological designations of Chinese and Western zodiac signs. Data analysis demonstrated that there was no statistical significance found between Western and Chinese Zodiac signs and mortality or infections.
CONCLUSION
Scientific experiments and studies conducted for the past six decades have shown that sun-sign astrology does not work, that natal-chart astrology does not work, and recent scientific studies show that Indian/Vedic astrology does not work and that Chinese astrology does not work.
Objective scientific investigation of the supernatural claims of astrology shows that those claims are false.
