Do You Believe in Astorology?

Astrology is among the oldest personality description system in the world. The fundamental hypothesis of astrology is pretty simple: it is based on the notion that the positions and mobility of celestial objects, including sun and moon as well as the stars and planets, at the moment of birth wield a unfathomed influence on personality and the course of one’s life. The concept of Astrology can be tracked back to Chaldeans' and Assyrians' society, centuries ago; A time when mankind hardly know the characteristic of celestial object.

That twelve-sign zodiac, commonly known as as sun-sign astrology, continues to be the most common form of traditional western astrology, different from various Asian astrological systems such as the one often seen by Americans on Chinese cafe place mats, that have almost no connection to the western format. A horoscope is basically a map of the heavens over Earth at the time of one’s birth, split into 12 zones, or signs of the zodiac.

The signs of the Zodiac, shown here, are named for
the shapes the ancients perceived in the stars

Horoscope is also a term presented to a projection centered upon that map. Each sign symbolizes the estimated position in the sky (in medieval times) of each zone’s namesake constellation. The paths of the sun, moon, and major planets are then tracked into the zodiac, and their countries at the specific event of childbirth noticed. Astrologers state that, this data pinpoints key factors of a one’s personality and works extremely well to develop projections about that their possible future.

Criticism: Precession of the Equinox

Considering a formal science, criticism to astrology is most likely originated from physics and astronomy As most people know, our cosmos is in a dynamic and functioning in 'forever-moving state'. The resulting changes in bodies’ positions relative to each other are slow and subtle, but they add up over time. One of the evidence is what we recognize as precession of the equinox, where the position of the constellations in sky have changed for about 30 degrees westward in the last 2,000 years. This phenomenon result in an undeniably fact, that the constellations which are used in the zodiac is no longer represent the same map that was designed in the era of ancient Babylonian.

However, this kind critics are often considered as irrelevant, especially when we willing to look deeper about astrology. The terminology used in astrology is ‘sign of the zodiac’, not ‘constellation of the zodiac’. These are two very different things, and that the signs of the zodiac doesn't align with the constellations through which the ecliptic passes.

The signs of the zodiac are simply a method of portraying ecliptic longitude. The first 30 degrees circling westward are labeled Aries 0 – 30. For example, the 12th degree of Gemini would be ecliptic longitude 72 degrees and the 2nd degree of Sagittarius goes along to ecliptic longitude 242 degrees. This approach began since the ancient time and was used in scientific literature in the 19th century.

Empirical Evidence

Yet another objection arises from psychological science: given the up-to-date human personality understanding, astrological proposition that everyone is purely belongs to one of 12 specific types for both personality and course of life just simply sketchy.  Based on psychological perspective, the astrology hype is because most people feel that it actually 'works' , which is explained in Forer effect or Barnum effect.

Taken from Wikipedia:

Barnum effect is observation that shows individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people.
This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, graphology, and some types of personality test.

Such phenomena have been proven plenty of times. One of them is experimental study where a class is informed that a professional astrologer has been drawn up for each single student, and they will get a written personality profiling. After that, all of the student are asked to evaluate the accuracy (on a scale of 1-5) of their zodiac profiling. Most students give 5 scale of their received profile. However, they didn't realize that all of the written personality profile is just generic 'fake' profile.

The other empirical studies involves real astrologers whom asked to match up the horoscope to the appropriate personality profiles. This kind of task should be a 'piece of cake' for professional astrologers like them. However, the reliability shown that they can't consistently pick accurate horoscope reading

Regardless of the reality that there is hardly a trustworthy of scientific evidence in its outcome, astrology remains to stay extremely desirable.

Further Reading:
Carlson, S. “A Double-Blind Test of Astrology.” Nature, 318 (1985):419–425; Clarke, D., and Gabriels, T. “Astrological Signs as Determinants of Extroversion and Emotionality: An Empirical Study.” Journal of Psychology, 130(2) (1996): 131–141.