By Christine Smallwood
Posted on April 11, 2020 by Andrew Source: Stat Modeling Photo Source: Unsplash, NASA
“Astrology in the age of uncertainty”:
Astrology is currently enjoying a broad cultural acceptance that hasn’t been seen since the nineteen-seventies. The shift began with the advent of the personal computer, accelerated with the Internet, and has reached new speeds through social media. According to a 2017 Pew Research Center poll, almost thirty per cent of Americans believe in astrology. . . .
In its penetration into our shared lexicon, astrology is a little like psychoanalysis once was. At mid-century, you might have heard talk of id, ego, or superego at a party; now it’s common to hear someone explain herself by way of sun, moon, and rising signs. It’s not just that you hear it. It’s who’s saying it: people who aren’t kooks or climate-change deniers, who see no contradiction between using astrology and believing in science. . . .
I did a quick search and indeed found this Pew report from October, 2018:
as·trol·o·gy /əˈsträləjē/ noun
the study of the movements and relative positions of celestial bodies interpreted as having an influence on human affairs and the natural world. - Google Oxford Language Dictionary
The only real surprise about this table to me was the religious breakdown. I had the vague sense of mainline Protestants as being the sensible people, but they have the same rate of believe in astrology as the general population. But, hey, I guess they’re normal Americans (on average) so they have normal American beliefs. Also surprising that only 3% of atheists believe in astrology. I guess this makes sense, but it somehow seemed plausible to me for someone to not believe in God but believe in other supernatural things: indeed, I could imagine astrology as a sort of substitute for a traditional religious system. But I guess not.
Also interesting when we think about the promoters of junk science in academia. I’ve analogized Brian Wansink to an astrologer who can make savvy insights about the world based on some combination of persuasiveness and qualitative understanding of the world, and then attribute his success to tarot cards or tea leaves rather than to a more prosaic ability to synthesize ideas and come up with good stories.
But does Brian Wansink actually believe in astrology? What about Marc Hauser, Ed Wegman, Susan Fiske, and the whole crowd of people who like to label their critics as “second-string, replication police, methodological terrorists, Stasi,” etc? I doubt they believe in astrology, as that represents a competing belief system: it’s an industry that, in some sense is an alternative to rah-rah Ted-talk science. I wouldn’t be surprised if prominent ESP researchers believe in astrology, but I also get the sense that mainstream junk-science promoters in academia and the news media don’t like to talk about ESP, as those research methods are uncomfortably close to theirs. They don’t want to endorse ESP researchers, as that would discredit their own work by association, but they don’t want to throw them under the bus, either, as they are fellow Ivy League academics, so their safest strategy is just keep to quiet about that stuff.
The larger point, though, is not belief in astrology per se, but the state of mind that allows people to believe in something so contradictory to our scientific understanding of the world. (OK, I apologize to the 29% of you who are not with me on this one. You can return to the fold when I go back to posting on statistical graphics, model checking, Bayesian computation, Jamaican beef patties, etc.)
It’s not that, a priori, astrology couldn’t be true: As with embodied cognition, beauty and sex ratio, ovulation and voting, air rage, ages ending in 9, and all the other Psychological Science / PNAS classics, we can come up with reasonable theories under which astrology is real and spectacular—it’s just that after years of careful study, nothing much has come up. And the possible theories out there aren’t really so persuasive: they’re bank-shot models of the world that could be fine if the goal was to gain understanding of a real and persistent phenomenon, but not so convincing without the empirical evidence.
Anyway, the point is that if 30% of Americans are willing to believe this sort of thing, it’s no surprise that some nontrivial percentage of influential American psychology professors are going to have the sort of attitude toward scientific theory and evidence that would lead them to have strong belief in weak theories supported by no good evidence. Indeed, not just support for particular weak theories, but support for the general principle that we should be nice to pseudoscientific theories (although, oddly enough, maybe not for astrology itself).
Infamous Astronomer: Nicolaus Copernicus, as also Renaissance polymath, mathematician who as you man know formulated the model of the Sun as the center of the universe not the earth. A theory still held today.
How is your prayer life? Why? What are your beliefs? How can this impact your health?
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