The stars are very popular, especially at the turn of the year. The number of people who believe in horoscopes is increasing rather than decreasing. There are psychological reasons for this – and perhaps political ones.
First things first, even if it may seem confusing at first: yes, stars and planets influence our fate. Maybe they can even help you to win at https://www.playamo.com/en-NZ/games/slots.
However, they do so in a way that is both more complex and much simpler than astrologers would have us believe: If the mechanics of the universe and the solar system were not exactly the way they are, we would not exist.
And if one day the sun feels like changing and turns into a red giant star, this will have a fundamental impact on the fate of the beings living on Earth.
However, when “the stars” are consulted again these days for questions such as “Will 2017 be just as bad?” or “Will he finally leave his wife for my sake?”, the same applies as in past millennia: What is being claimed is at best literature, often harmless entertainment, at worst – rarely – dangerous nonsense. In Japan, for example, unfavorable horoscopes are said to have led to greatly increased abortion rates at least once.
A few simple facts to illustrate this. Anyone celebrating their birthday these days has the zodiac sign of Capricorn. Depending on the system used, this zodiac sign contains around 26 to 30 stars. Its main star, Delta Capricorni, is about 39 light years away from us, making it the closest to Earth. The most distant point of the constellation is Tau Capricorni, which is actually a cluster of at least two, possibly even three stars. Tau Capricorni is about 1140 light years away.
Hard-working and conscientious: David Bowie, Lemmy Kilmister
Viewing the constellation of Capricorn as a closed unit that is significant for the fate of individual people is a bit like looking for points in Bad Nauheim, Oslo, Stockholm and 23 other places somewhere in between from Frankfurt and then declaring them to be a “constellation” whose totality has something to do with the personality and future of Frankfurters born in a certain period of time.
Of course, this comparison is flawed because, firstly, the “constellation” of Capricorn is even more complex in spatial terms and, secondly, all of its components are in fact always moving.
Nevertheless, there are people – millions and millions of people – who believe that “Capricorns”, for example, are “hard-working, patient and realistic”. Which is funny again when you know that Lemmy Kilmister, David Bowie and Janis Joplin were Capricorns, for example.
Nevertheless, if statistics are to be trusted, this superstition has recently become more popular again. According to various surveys, almost a quarter of Germans – more women than men, by the way – believe that “the stars influence our lives”. However, only two percent are hardcore believers in astrology.
The situation is even worse in the USA, where the number of people who consider astrology to be “completely unscientific” is apparently falling. In 2010 it was still 66 percent, in 2012 only just over half of the population . Reason does not have an easy time of it here either.
The horoscope of the serial killer – sure, it fits!
A historical study published in “Nature” in 1985 showed beyond doubt and with the active involvement of astrologers that astrologers – contrary to their own predictions – cannot make any valid statements about the personality of a test person beyond coincidence based on the date of birth.
Although the author Shawn Carlson had implemented all the wishes of astrologers with regard to the study design and evaluation. Of course, there are still astrologers who doubt the results to this day.
Conversely, test subjects are not able to find the personality profile that is right for them from a range of astrological personality profiles. French psychologist and astrologer Michel Gauquelin demonstrated this particularly clearly in the late 1960s: He sent 150 test subjects a supposedly personal horoscope and asked them how much the text applied to them personally.
Over 90 percent found themselves in it. In fact, the text was a real horoscope created by an astrologer – but the one for the date of birth of the French serial killer Marcel Petiot .
Astrology and totalitarian systems
This brings us to the core of belief in astrology: the predictions and statements made are so vague that they almost always feel half right. And we humans, if it’s not too nasty, believe almost any nonsense we are told about ourselves. There is even a scientific name for this fact: the “Barnum effect”, named after, no joke, the famous circus director.
The US psychologist Bertram Forer provided the best experimental evidence of the effect back in 1948. He presented students with the alleged result of a personality test that they had previously completed and asked them to rate how well the result described themselves on a scale from one for “not at all” to five for “very good”. On average, the students awarded more than 4.2 points. In fact, all test subjects had read the same “test result”. Forer had composed it from set pieces that he had taken from a magazine horoscope.
You can find this all harmless and irrelevant, after all, most people probably read horoscopes for entertainment rather than to guide their lives. However, articles such as “The best homeopathy for your star sign”, which still appear in well-known German magazines today, are at least annoying.
The unbroken popularity of astrology can also be read, like the reliably sinister Theodor W. Adorno, as a sign of people’s dangerous seductiveness. In an essay called “The Stars Down to Earth”, first published in English in 1957, Adorno took apart the texts of the astrology column in the Los Angeles Times – and came to the conclusion that astrology had a lot in common with totalitarian states.
Both claimed “to have a key for everything, to know all the answers, both reduce the complex to simple and mechanical conclusions and sweep aside everything that is strange and unknown, while at the same time explaining absolutely nothing.” This sounds frighteningly familiar to us today.
