A Korean scientist conducted a study on a large sample and showed that zodiac signs cannot influence a person’s fate. Modern science, as you know, completely rejects astrology, and the US National Science Foundation uses it as a “criterion” of pseudoscience. Astrology refers to magical, hostile practices based on concepts that are incompatible with scientific data. Astrologers often use professional terminology accepted by psychology in this regard. In 1975, 186 world-renowned scientists, including 18 Nobel laureates, published a statement called Objection to Astrology, in which they expressed concern about the media’s willingness to give stripes to astrologers.

As far as we can tell, not much has changed since then. Unfortunately, astrology is often supported even by some scientists. For example, Doctor of Chemical Sciences Felix Velichko believes that astrology occupies a middle position between religion and science. And in 2000, India decided to open a course on “Vedic astrology” in local universities, but some Indian scientists still oppose it.

However, research on the failure of astrology is extremely rare. One of the reasons is the apparent meaninglessness of the issue (although a large number of people in the world make vital decisions based on predictions from the stars). Most studies on this subject consist of a small sample.

Perhaps the most famous experiment on the problem of astrology was started by scientists from Great Britain in 1958 and continues to this day. Researchers are studying the lives of more than two thousand people born approximately 4.8 minutes apart (in astrology, these are called “temporal twins”). If you believe the planets, then such people have similar professions, level of intelligence, habits, state of health, marital status, etc. must have. But they found no similarities between these people.

Scientist Mohsen Joshanlu from Kemen University (South Korea)Muhsin Joshanloo conducted his own research and provided new evidence of the failure of astrology. It was able to overcome the shortcomings of previous studies with a small sample size and examined data from 12,791 participants (average age 50, about 55 percent were women) from a nationally representative sample of the U.S. General Social Survey conducted since 1972. . In his research, the scientist focused on the data of the last four waves of the survey for 2016, 2018, 2021 and 2022. Their findings were presented in the journal Kyklos.

Subjects’ well-being was evaluated according to the following parameters: general feeling of unhappiness, symptoms of depression, level of mental stress, dissatisfaction with work and financial situation, feeling of “grayness” of life, self-evaluation of health, and unhappiness in marriage.

Joshanlu used a combination of statistical methods, but one of the most important was analysis of covariance, which allowed comparison of group means while controlling for the effects of other variables such as age, gender, and education. The scientist did not find a statistically significant effect of zodiac signs on seven out of eight well-being indicators. The only exception was financial dissatisfaction, for which there was a statistically significant, albeit insignificant, effect.

Joshanlu conducted a post hoc analysis to confirm the results. He created an independent quantity (a randomly generated number between one and 12) and compared its predictive power with the performance of horoscopes on people’s well-being.

It turns out that there is no significant difference between the prognostic abilities of zodiac signs and a random variable. According to the scientist, this strongly suggests that astrology cannot predict a person’s well-being and that the observed effects are likely to be coincidental. It is also possible to “predict” a person’s fate by throwing dice or a coin.