Scientists paid astrologers $1,000 to prove zodiac signs predict the future: Here’s what happened
Despite the millions of people who believe in it, astrology has never been shown to have any scientific proof. Now, it has been put to the test.
Astronomy and astrology have long since been mixed up by the general public: the former is the branch of science that deals with celestial objects; the latter is a belief that those objects can somehow influence your personality or future.
The scientific method has, since its creation over hundreds of years, managed to shave away the fiction from fact, and it takes incremental steps through evidence-based reasoning that has allowed humans to go from cave-dwelling fire-starters to building robots that can now outthink them.
This way of moving forward in our understanding of the Universe has also had its hand in trying to prove something that is as yet unproven: astrology. Before the scientific method, people drew pictures in the night sky and assigned the shiny pin points names, symbols, and meanings. This was not just a way to recognise them but to try to understand them, and how they could influence human life on Earth.
This faith — a belief in something despite a lack of evidence — in the stars eventually evolved into what it is today: a business that brings in millions of dollars as people see their futures laid out in what the stars ‘tell them’.
Scientists test if astrology is real: here’s what they found
An experiment from ClearerThinking.org put astrology to the test. They tested both amateur and professional astrologers, offering them $1,000 if they could reach a certain level of accuracy with their predictions from the stars (of course, were astrology true they’d all have known this experiment was going to happen and could have planned for it, but let’s not spoil the fun).
Before letting the astrologers loose, researchers measured real-life outcomes for real people while being aware of their Sun signs, with the method based on birth charts — maps of the placements of stars and planets at the time of one’s birth that are said to define personalities and eventual futures.
“We quantified how well Sun signs predicted outcomes using a statistical measure called the correlation coefficient, denoted as ‘r’,” they said in a study published on Clearer Thinking. “This coefficient measures the strength and direction of the relationship between two variables—here, the prediction of each life outcome using astrological sun signs and each life outcome itself.”
In the end, they found that there was absolutely no correlation between any of the data used for the experiment. In fact, the results were so at odds with anything worthy of a conclusive answer, that they repeated the experiment with random numbers and dates, not following the Sun signs, and found the exact same levels of incoherence in the data.
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This was when they brought in the experts. Astrologers were called in to take this test, which they were then asked to match with the corresponding chart. “Not a single astrologer got more than 5 out of the 12 questions correct, despite more than half of astrologers reporting (right after finishing the tasks) that they believed they had gotten more than 5 right,” the researchers said in another study, also published on Clearer Thinking. “More experienced astrologers did no better than less experienced ones.” I guess they should have predicted what questions were going to come up in the test. As Neil deGrasse Tyson told Kelly Clarkson: “You think Mars gives a rat’s ass about you?”
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