I once saw a film of a classroom exercise: A bunch of college students are asked to state their dates of birth, then handed purported astrological profiles, and asked to assess them for accuracy. Most of them say the profile matches their personalities pretty well. Then each student passes his/her profile to the next student, and it turns out they’re all identical. The point is to demonstrate that a pseudoscience such as astrology can’t even be tested for scientific accuracy, because its pronouncements are too vague. And, of course, in light of modern astronomy, the very idea of the motions of planets and “constellations” having any kind of effect on human affairs seems nonsensical.
But let’s forget, for a moment, about the books written by astrologers, newspaper horoscopes, etc. In fact, let’s forget entirely about the stars and the planets and the shapes they formed in the eyes of ancient Babylonians and Greeks.
The basic claim of astrology, in its broadest possible form, is this: Given a couple of items of information about a person – date, time, and place of birth – it is possible to predict something about that person’s personality, life story, or whatever.
So stated, the idea isn’t all that flatly preposterous. No causal mechanism suggests itself, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be one – something, perhaps, that our ancestors noticed subconsciously, and mistakenly attributed to the stars. Perhaps there is something at work in our biology that is affected by what time of year you were born, etc. Something to do with biorythms, perhaps (also a likely pseudoscience, but just suppose).
Testing the idea would be simple. We do have a lot of hard scientific instruments for finding things out about individual personalities – psychological tests, IQ tests, personality-profile tests. Some question the scientific validity of some of these, but it seems clear that all are at least measuring some stable feature of the individual, regardless of what real importance that feature might have. If I give you a Myers-Briggs personality test now, and again a year later, I will probably get the same result both times. Same with an IQ test or a Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Test.
Suppose we gather a group of test subjects and:
(1) We ask them all to put down their birthdates and birthplaces.
(2) We put them through a battery of psychological tests; and also quiz them about their life stories, their employment history, education, religion, hobbies – anything of demographic interest.
(3) Then we try to find some statistically significant correlation between the first set of data and the second.
If we find any kind of correlation at all between birthdate/place and personality type, or IQ, or career success, or anything else, then that means there must be something here that at least merits further investigation.
If no correlations are found, that would prove once and for all that astrology, even by a broad and vague definition, is totally bunk; and all of America’s astrologers, being the intellectually honest people that they are, would have no choice but to make a lateral career move to tea leaf reading.
What do you think? Would this be an experiment worth doing? Has anything like it ever been tried?
