• Question: Is there a way to prove how accurate zodiac signs are?

    Asked by anon-181162 on 5 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Alex Haragan

      Alex Haragan answered on 5 Jun 2018:

      Everyone is free to believe what they want of course – but in my opinion zodiac signs, astrology, and predictions based on these are as likely to be accurate as random choice.

      I don’t doubt that some of the people who write zodiac sign predictions really do believe what they write, and if it gives people a sense of optimism about the future there’s little harm in it.

      But! And there is a big but – you are asking scientists. So the first thing every scientist asks when answering a question like this is “where is the evidence?”.
      There is, to my knowledge, no substantial evidence to back up zodiac sign predictions. There is no evidence that star signs of zodiac signs are predictive of specific human futures and when I think about it, it just doesn’t make much sense.
      Now you might have had, or might have met someone who says “yes well but I got a prediction and it all came true!”
      But when you are reading the predictions from a sceptical perspective – they are always loosely written with vague statements and wishy-washy predictions. In other words if something happens to you, they are quite easy to make it sound like it was predicting it.
      Example: “You may have fortune this week”. Now if you find a fiver, or avoid a close accident, or score the winning goal – or almost anything else then you can say “look – it came true!” – but its a fairly nonspecific statement!
      It doesn’t hurt to read these things – but it also doesn’t hurt to be scientific and think critically about them!

    • Photo: Lauren Burns

      Lauren Burns answered on 6 Jun 2018:

      I also agree with Alex, that there is (yet) to be proof of Zodiac signs being accurate, currently I doubt they are, however if a robust experiment was conducted, then perhaps I would be swayed (although, as scientists, we all criticise everything we read!). If, as scientists, we were going to find a way to see if zodiac signs are accurate we would have to conduct an experiment. You would have to define what you want to find out: e.g. do different zodiac signs have certain personality traits? Successful relationships? Do people get along better with certain other signs? (these are all things I have seen claimed in magazines!) So, how would we test it? Can we prove zodiac signs are accurate?

      Let’s take the research question: Is there a relationship between an individuals’ zodiac sign and their personality. This is something we could test. There are standard personality tests, such as the ‘Big Five’ Personality Test, or the 16 Personality Factor (16 PF), or the Neo Personality Inventory, we would then do our research to determine which test is best. If we thought the 16PF (for example) was best, we would have to work out how many people are needed to find statistical significance (which would be a lot!). At the very least, you would have to include a ‘demographics’ section in the test (e.g. gender, date of birth, ethnicity etc.) and send this test to a large number of people to answer the questions to the personality test and the demographics.

      Afterwards, you’d run some statistics to see if people born within certain date ranges (taken from the zodiac signs), are more likely to have a certain personality trait. Then, voila! You have a study. Time to get published! However, and this is a big however. This study would be riddled with biases, that can make the answer to the research question not very robust, and even if a relationship was seen between a sign and a personality trait, it does NOT mean that it causes anything. If you go into science (especially Psychology based, where there are so many biases and factors to take into account) the biggest thing to remember is ‘correlation does not imply causation’. Just because two things are related, there are ALWAYS other reasons why this may be the case.

      So, if I conduct the above study, and if you read a magazine that says something like: ‘ZODIAC SIGNS PROVEN TO CAUSE PERSONALITY TRAITS’, this is so not the case. We can see if things are related, but there will always be people (because we are all unique) who cannot be defined into one group, and there may be other reasons why people have those traits which takes us into the nature/nurture debate, among others.

      Thank you for asking this question, it is always nice to think about different studies – and perhaps if you are interested in finding out the answer to this one, I will be reading one of your papers on this subject one day!

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