Research confirms that the horoscope has no connection with well-being

Are they sagittarius, leo, aries, libra and pisces lucky zodiac signs as some believe?

Hardly. Zodiac signs have no bearing on people’s happiness, financial satisfaction or general health, confirms a wide väestö­tutkimus.

The idea behind horoscopes is that the positions of the heavenly bodies at the time of a person’s birth influence the destinies of people on earth in some supernatural way.

Horoscope could in principle affect people also in such natural, i.e. psychological or social-psychological ways.

According to one theory, people may consciously or unconsciously behave according to their zodiac signs. So, for example, someone classified as a lion would behave as a lion is supposed to behave.

Such a self-fulfilling effect could therefore also be important for a person’s psychological well-being.

Another natural mechanism would come from the direction of other people.

Perhaps others treat people differently based on their Zodiac sign. A lion would therefore be treated differently than, for example, an Aries.

This difference in the attitude of other people could affect how satisfied people are in life.

Such however, natural explanations require that people’s happiness varies according to their zodiac sign.

However, this is not the case, a researcher from Keimyung in Korea and the University of Melbourne in Australia shows in his research Mohsen Joshanloo.

He used four regularly conducted, nationally representative surveys in the United States as his data.

In surveys, people give information about many things and their attitudes.

Joshanloo was interested in information about happiness, depressive symptoms, psychological burden, job satisfaction, financial satisfaction, boredom in life, health and marital happiness.

The researcher divided the nearly 13,000 people who took part in the survey into horoscopes based on their date of birth and found statistical connections between star sign and well-being.

Connections was not found in any other feature but one.

Only financial satisfaction was found to have a statistically significant connection, but even that was negligible.

Joshanloo did an additional test in which people were randomly divided into 12 categories, i.e. as many as there are zodiac signs. So people were divided into firsts, seconds, thirds and so on.

It turned out that a random number predicted people’s well-being just as well or poorly as a zodiac sign.

“The zodiac sign says as little about people’s well-being as their classification into groups based on the toss of a coin or a lottery cube,” the researcher writes in his conclusions.

The study was published by the scientific journal Kyklos and is available to read Research Gate – service.