By Danielle Tobb ’17

A horoscope is a general forecast of a person’s future, typically including information on that person’s character, mannerisms, and love life. Virtually every newspaper and magazine includes a section on horoscopes. The horoscopes found in magazines are based off of a concept called sun sign astrology. This is a much simpler version of astrology that only considers the position of the sun at birth. However, many are skeptical of the validity of these short blurbs of information that are supposedly “scientific.” And so one question remains: how accurate are these predictions?

According to astrology, the position of the stars and planets at the time of one’s birth shapes a person’s personality, romantic relationships, and even their fortune. Each individual falls under a certain zodiac sign that is based on which constellation the sun passed through when he or she was born. These 12 constellations are known as the zodiac. Each of these groups is associated with a different personality type.

In 1949, an American psychologist named Bertram Forer described the tendency of individuals to interpret general statements as being accurate for them personally, even when they are not. Forer administered a personality test to a group of students; giving every student the same personality results in the end. The description of their personalities was basically snippets from horoscope readings. More than 80 percent of the students deemed the results very accurate, thus showing how easily people can be led into believing the accuracy of such horoscopes. This experiment was the basis of what soon became known as the Forer, or Barnum Effect.

Similarly, an American psychologist named Ross Stagner tested the validity of horoscopes in the late 1950s. He gave 68 HR Managers a detailed questionnaire that would help with creating a psychological description of each person. He then made one fake description using 13 phrases from different horoscopes.

After reading their descriptions, the participants were tasked with deeming the horoscopes amazingly true, very true, somewhere in the middle, mostly erroneous, or completely wrong. More than a third of the individuals felt that their psychological portraits were very true, 40 percent deemed them quite accurate, and almost nobody saw them as completely erroneous.

Overall, the validity of horoscopes is in the eye of the beholder. As shown by Forer, individuals have the tendency to agree with the general descriptions found in horoscopes. The human mind is easily manipulated, so it is very difficult to discern the true legitimacy of horoscopes as a whole when people often believe what they want to believe about themselves.