Sunday, July 27, 2008
Sun Sign Astrology
Summary: Here is a link to a simple survey, to determine for myself the validity of sun sign astrology. It consists of 17 questions.
1. Sun sign astrology is highly popular and is still published in main stream newspapers all around the world.
2. The basic premise of sun sign astrology is that people's characteristics are correlated with their birthdays.
3. I know several people (some of them scientists) who believe in sun sign astrology. They typically study the characteristics associated with each sun, and claim to have observed a strong correlation between the sun signs of the people they know and their characteristics.
4. However this kind of reasoning may suffer from the flaw that people typically remember the hits and forget to correctly account for the misses -- similar to why people seem to agree with Murphy's law from their daily experiences.
5. An another reason why astrology is popular may be explained with the Forer effect. It is "the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people". (Read Forer's demonstration is the above wiki article...it is quite funny)
5. I have read the characteristics associated with sun signs myself, and when I try to see people around me, I have to concede, it does seem like there is some correlation. Am I falling a prey to phsycological factors or is there really a correlation? Tons of research conducted, as archived here, all conclude that there is no truth whatsoever in astrology. Yet, it would be nice to verify it myself with an objective test...1. Sun sign astrology is highly popular and is still published in main stream newspapers all around the world.
2. The basic premise of sun sign astrology is that people's characteristics are correlated with their birthdays.
3. I know several people (some of them scientists) who believe in sun sign astrology. They typically study the characteristics associated with each sun, and claim to have observed a strong correlation between the sun signs of the people they know and their characteristics.
4. However this kind of reasoning may suffer from the flaw that people typically remember the hits and forget to correctly account for the misses -- similar to why people seem to agree with Murphy's law from their daily experiences.
5. An another reason why astrology is popular may be explained with the Forer effect. It is "the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people". (Read Forer's demonstration is the above wiki article...it is quite funny)
6. I am requesting people to take this survey of 17 questions (Thanks to my friend for creating the applet). The survey first asks you your birthdate and then gives 12 sets of characteristics. For each of the set of characteristics, the responder should give a score ranging from 0 to 10; a score of 10 meaning that he thinks his personality fits perfectly with the current set, while a score of 0 means that the current set does not describe the responder at all. Each of the sets of characteristics are those that are associated with various sun signs. The purpose of the experiments is to see empirically, what ratings does the "correct" sun sign obtain. Does it get a relatively high or low score. A high rating would suggest some correlation and vice versa. Of course, the survey would work the best with people who have no exposure to sun sign astrology!
Here is the link.
