How do horoscopes work

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List of 12 star signs. Astrology is either an ancient and valuable system of understanding the natural world and our place in it with roots in early Mesopotamia, China, Egypt and Greece, or complete rubbish, depending on whom you ask. But newspaper and magazine horoscopes? They get even less respect, from both skeptics and true believers. The first real newspaper horoscope column is widely credited to R. Naylor, a prominent British astrologer of the first half of the 20th century. Astrology posits that the natural world and we human beings in it are affected by the movements of the sun, moon and stars through the heavens, and that who we are is shaped by the exact position of these celestial bodies at the time of our birth.

A natal star chart, therefore, presents the sky on the date and exact time of birth, from which the astrologer extrapolates character traits and predictions. Following the interest the public showed in the Princess Margaret horoscope, the paper decided to run several more forecasts from Naylor. Suddenly, a lot more people were paying attention to the star column. The column offered advice to people whose birthdays fell that the week, but within a few years, Naylor or a clever editor determined that he needed to come up with something that could apply to larger volumes of readers.

This fits with what newspapers really are and have virtually always been — not just vehicles for hard news and so-called important stories, but also distributors of entertainment gossip and sports scores, advice on love matters and how to get gravy stains out of clothing, practical information about stock prices and TV schedules, recipes and knitting patterns, comics and humor, even games and puzzles.

Whether those features are the spoonful of sugar to help the hard news medicine go down or whether people just pick up the paper for the horoscope makes little difference to the bottom line. A National Science Foundation survey from found that just 12 percent of Americans read their horoscope every day or often, while 32 percent read them occasionally.

More recently, the American Federation of Astrologers put the number of Americans who read their horoscope every day as high as 70 million, about 23 percent of the population.

Astrologers, meanwhile, were far more sanguine — your sign is still your sign, they counseled; some, Cainer included, sighed that the wobble story was just another salvo in the fiercely pitched battle between astronomers and astrologers. At the same time, a significant portion of the population believe in the underpinnings of newspapers horoscopes.

People who read their horoscopes also pay attention to what they say. More recent research, published in the October issue of the Journal of Consumer Research , found that people who read a negative horoscope were more likely to indulge in impulsive or self-indulgent behavior soon after. Reading horoscopes is a popular diversion, but is there any science to suggest it means anything? As many as 70 million Americans read their horoscopes daily. In , the General Social Survey found that 34 percent of Americans surveyed consider astrology to be "very" or "sort of scientific" and also reported a decrease—from two-thirds to around one-half—in the fraction of people who consider astrology " not at all scientific.

Astrology is generally defined as the belief that astronomical phenomena, like the stars overhead when you were born or the fact that Mercury is in retrograde , have the power to influence the daily events in our lives and our personality traits. This is, of course, very different from the study of astronomy, which is the scientific study of celestial objects, space, and the physics of the universe.

Magazines like The Cut reported an increase of percent more hits on horoscope pages in than in Clearly, lots of people are looking for ways to interpret the stars for advice.

Astrology is founded on understanding the positions of the stars, which seems like a scientific enough pursuit in itself.

But is there any science to back up whether astrology impacts our personality and our lives?