Why do we believe in astrology?
How a harmless hobby can quickly turn judgemental when left unchecked
You may have noticed a resurgence of people on your Twitter feed citing a person’s “star sign” for one of their dreadful behaviors. While most people enjoy looking up their horoscopes for kicks and giggles, others heavily rely on astrology to explain abstract phenomena that occur in our daily lives.
Is there a psychological explanation for our fascination with astrology?
The answer is the same as other metaphysical subjects, whether that’s as small as superstitions or as large as religions.
It makes us feel like we’re connected to something bigger than ourselves, that there is a bigger orchestration for the events in our lives, and that the low points in our personalities are simply not our fault.
Think about why the Standford Prison Experiment is a cultural staple (even though its legitimacy is questionable). We want to believe that if we have pitfalls or do bad things, it’s not us. There has to be something bigger here right?
If we already have set identities for ourselves, we can use astrology to simply confirm what we wish to believe. In this way, we’re implementing confirmation bias when looking at our horoscopes or our proposed personality traits for our sign. In other words, we’re extremely vulnerable to believing things we simply want to believe rather than looking at situations objectively.
You don’t even have to keep looking up your horoscope to subject yourself to confirmation bias — it could even be a Hogwarts Sorting Hat test that you retake because you got Hufflepuff, but you swore you were a Gryffindor.
This can give some indication as to why horoscopes “resonate” with us — because our species enjoys putting things in boxes. Even with something as arbitrary as astrology, we are vulnerable to saying things like, “I’m indecisive because I’m a Libra.”
Psychiatrist Anthony Daniels (also known as Theodore Dalrymple) notes that some detrimental aspects of modern psychology can cause people to make excuses for their bad behaviors.
While this can be a caveat of any health issue, it can also be applied to taking astrology readings. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Daniels quotes a section of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” in one of his books, talking about how “we (blame) the sun, the moon and the stars” whenever something good or bad happens.
Like how we place blame on others for mishaps, we tend to avoid blame by placing it on the shoulders of our sign.
We have a knack for categorizing things, especially when it comes to affiliating ourselves to larger groups. This can be applied to sports teams but also things like being from a certain state or country. Using astrology to explain the negative aspects of an individual’s personality is a modern yet ancient application of Tajfel’s social identity theory.
Henri Tajfel, a Polish social psychologist, was famous for conducting research in areas of prejudice and social identity theory. His work is cited heavily when talking about the psychology of sports fans.
There are three mental processes that Tajfel and his colleague John Turner say are an important part of social identity theory. Those three processes are categorization, social identification, and social comparison.
- Categorization refers to identifying the group you or others “belong” to. You simply group yourself and your friends into their respective signs. This could be as simple as stating, “I’m a Capricorn.”
- Social identification is when we start to take up the behaviors that belong to the group we categorized ourselves in, whether we realize it or not. This is concurrent with someone saying, “As an Aries, impulsive decisions are second nature to me,” even if the person hasn’t had a history of that personality trait.
- Social comparison occurs when we begin to compare our groups with other groups, such as “Aquarian lovers are more detached, but Cancers are easier to connect with emotionally.” Furthermore, we’re always looking for our group to come out on top; this can easily be a side effect of social comparison. People might be quick to cite the redeeming qualities of their signs — “As a Virgo, I’m organized and detailed oriented. Besides, Béyonce is a Virgo.”
At the end of the day, horoscopes are fun to read about, and they make for interesting tabletop conversations. However, we shouldn’t fall victim to making generalized statements about large groups of people. After all, we are so much more than just a daily horoscope that’s tailored to fit millions of people.
Or maybe I’m just overanalyzing this because I’m an Aquarius.
This article was originally published here. Anu Kumar is the original author and authorizes this article to be republished on the Medium Publication Corpus Callosum.
New content to this article was added for this version of the publication. Formatting was modified to better-fit Medium, and missing Oxford commas were inserted.
