Well I don't read German, so I'd have to learn German to be able to read the study which makes that claim. And then I'd only be in a position to start evaluating the accuracy of the claim. You'll pardon me for not being immediately overwhelmed by this fact.

When I had a brief interest in astrology many years ago, here is what I found out. First of all a well-written horoscope will leave about 70% of people convinced that it is fairly specific and applies well to them. This makes anecdotal evidence easy to find and makes studying it in a precise way difficult. I also found that attempts have been made to find correlations between personality and sun signs with a general lack of success.

Note that when I say general, I do not mean absolute. There was at least one study that found a significant correlation between personality and sun signs. However upon re-examination of the data, the study sample fell into 3 groups. Those who had little knowledge of astrology had no correlation. Those who had some knowledge of astrology had significant correlation. Those who had a lot of knowledge of astrology had no correlation. The explanation appears to be that people who had some knowledge of astrology tailored their answers to what they thought right based on a limited understanding of astrology. Those with little or a lot of knowledge answered more accurately for who they were. (When you know enough astrology, you can justify virtually any personality by stressing the influences of the moon, various planets, etc just right.)

Anyways now there are much more efficient research tools to skim what's known about any particular topic. Lemme visit Google, notice that the first link seems irrelevant, and then links number two, three and four show lots of studies that looked hard for a correlation and didn't find one.

As for the rest of what you say, it was all conditional on a correlation being found to exist. But that correlation remains unproven (in fact it has been demonstrated that, if it exists, it must be pretty small), and so we have no need to rush out and figure out how we're going to rewrite the science books just yet.

In reply to Re: Astrology? (was: departing programming, what is the next best step?) by tilly
in thread departing programming, what is the next best step? by thaigrrl

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