This study is hilarious in that they found 152 people who were willing to do it, but as a “scientific” study, especially one purporting to take astrology seriously enough to test it empirically, this is just not good science. What they tested is not how astrology claims to work. I’m not defending pop astrology or personality horoscopes, but if you’re going to test something and call it science, you should at least try to understand what you’re testing. Most of the criteria they were having people guess at, things like education level and number of friends, have never really been things astrologers have claimed to be able to predict from a birth chart.
The authors themselves admit they were rejected by most astrologers and astrology groups they approached, including the two biggest astrology subreddits (which, given the kind of slop most Reddit groups allow, tells you a lot). They eventually found 152 people willing to participate by advertising a $1,000 prize in Facebook groups and recruiting 6 self-described “professional” astrologers through the same means, without any set standard for qualifications or even requiring participants to demonstrate knowledge of astrological concepts.
Besides the 6 “professionals,” literally anyone who claimed to believe in astrology could participate for a chance at winning $1,000, including people who may have merely seen it as gambling or may have been participating in bad faith to skew results (given the general response to this, there are clearly plenty of people who feel strongly enough about proving astrology doesn’t work to have motivation). This is not really very different from saying you want to test whether self-driving cars are better at driving than humans by going to the first bar you can find and offering $1,000 to anyone who can beat one in a race. Offering a cash reward fundamentally alters who will take the test, and inevitably some of the participants are going to be drunk, blind, or simply bad at driving, but will still try for $1,000.
Astrological readings are supposed to be iterative and dialogic; this was a one-shot multiple choice test with no feedback. If we’re taking astrology seriously enough to test it, this is like asking a doctor to diagnose and treat a patient from an intake form without examining them, and then concluding that medicine doesn’t work when they get it wrong.
What is actually hilarious though is that the study’s own data includes a finding that undermines its conclusion (near the bottom of their own publication), and the authors desperately wave it away. After coming back to the data after criticism and isolating the 17 participants they could verify as professional astrologers, that group performed above chance with a p-value of 0.003 (~ 1 in 333 odds against chance). They dismiss this as post-hoc analysis, but it’s also the only subgroup in the study where anyone bothered to verify the participants actually knew what they were doing. Even the authors conclude that seems like the kind of thing that deserves a follow-up study, but clearly doing that would be inconvenient to the smug astrology doesn’t work gotcha they wanted to produce I guess since they didn’t pursue it.
If you actually want to test whether or not astrology works, better studies have been done, and the results have been controversial to say the least: The Gauquelin Mars Effect research tested a specific, measurable claim about planetary positions at birth correlating with professional eminence, and skeptical groups initially replicated the results twice before the whole thing devolved into decades of arguments about data selection. The infamous Carlson double-blind study from 1985 published in Nature declared astrology dead, but a later reanalysis by Professor Ertel at Göttingen found that when you actually apply the study’s own protocol correctly and test the full sample rather than cherry-picked subgroups, astrologers performed above chance at statistically significant levels again. The Vernon Clark experiments from the early 1960s used a proper blind matching design with verified astrologers and found performance significant at 100 to 1 odds against chance across three separate tests.
Everyone always gets stuck at “there’s no mechanism for astrology to work by even if tests produce some weird results” but anyone who has been paying attention to science for the last half century should know that’s not actually true. We now have decades of scientific evidence showing that humans are biologically sensitive to and respond to everything from moon cycles (even when we can’t see the moon) and normal geomagnetic and solar activity to solar storms and sunspots etc. in a variety of different but physiologically verifiable ways.
NASA’s Dr. Jane Blizzard proved that planetary conjunctions, oppositions, and 90° alignments trigger violent solar disturbances and she accurately predicted 12 of 19 major solar flares using planetary positions alone. Researchers at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf have spent the last decade building a physical model that derives virtually all of the Sun’s known activity cycles from the tidal forces of Venus, Earth, and Jupiter, finding what lead author Dr. Frank Stefani called “complete parallelism with the planets over the course of 90 cycles.”
The sun’s activity literally follows the rhythm of the planets. A separate team at ETH Zurich independently reached the same conclusion using 10,000 years of ice core data.
Science has long known of magnetic particles in the human brain stem, cerebellum, and cerebrum, first identified by Caltech geophysicist Joe Kirschvink in 1992 and replicated many times since. In 2019 Kirschvink’s own lab went further and proved through EEG that the human brain actively detects and responds to changes in earth-strength magnetic fields, with the response tuned to the local geomagnetic environment rather than being a generic physical fluke. Studies also show geomagnetic field conditions play a major role in fetal development. We aren’t separate from the earth or the forces that influence it; we live inside and are biologically influenced by the earth itself, which means we are influenced by what influences it.
Astrophysicist and astrologer Percy Seymour’s proposed mechanism is that planets orchestrate solar activity through tidal resonance, solar activity drives geomagnetic fluctuations on earth, and those fluctuations influence every organism on the planet. Every claim in that chain has independent scientific support.
One of the original pioneers of the study of space weather, Professor Balfour Stewart, in 1872, without having any of the other evidence above and arriving at his conclusions solely from studying the relationship between planetary alignments and sunspots, said “if all these speculations are proved right, it means we were totally mistaken about Medieval Astrology.”
Ancient people weren’t stupid. They recognized that we are part of and subject to systems and forces larger than ourselves. The modern zodiac is the result of 5,000+ years of human observation and modeling across multiple civilizations. It is literally the oldest science that humans have consistently practiced and recorded data on.
If you think this is a closed or non-serious topic or that you’re smarter than anyone else because you ~don’t believe in astrology~ when there is active ongoing scientific debate that increasingly points toward a legitimate causal mechanism between planetary movements and biological life and behavior on earth, you are literally just anti-science.
Science says the sun, moon, and planets do affect us. Right or not, Astrology has at least been asking how.
