Science Vs - Astrology: Are Geminis the Worst?

Episode Date: September 3, 2020

For centuries, people have been looking to the stars to tell us all kinds of things — what our future holds, who we should date. So what does the science say about astrology? It turns out, there’s some surprising stuff here. We speak to astronomer Prof. Caty Pilachowski, Prof. Dave Henningsen and astrology lover Natalie Norman.  Here’s a link to the transcript: https://bit.ly/31VTDoM  This episode was produced by Meryl Horn and Rose Rimler, with help from Wendy Zukerman, Michelle Dang, Hannah Harris Green and Nick DelRose. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell with help from Caitlin Kenney. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard. Music written by Peter Leonard, Marcus Bagala, Emma Munger, and Bobby Lord. Thanks to everyone we got in touch with for this episode including Professor Todd Tinsley, Dr. Peter Hartmann, Dr. Katie Mack, Dr. Kathy Cooksey, Professor John Mcgrew, Professor Jim Kaler, Dr. Alex Storrs, Julius Bjerrekær, Laura Gilmore and others. And special thanks to Chris Suter, Max Gibson, the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. This is the show that pits facts against fortune tellers. On today's show, we're looking up at the stars. What's your sign? I'm a cancer crab. I'm very moody, very hard exterior like a crab. And then once you get to know me, I'm like really gushy and mushy inside. Gushy is the word of the season.

And I am very gushy. This is Natalie Norman. She's a comedian and she's been into astrology for a very long time. My earliest memory is being on a dial-up computer and honestly having a crush on someone I went to elementary school with and for some odd reason I knew their birthday. So I googled it. What did it say about you and your crush?

Okay, so he was a Scorpio. And so a very good match. Very good sexual connection. How old were you? Probably like 11. They madly fell in love and got married. No, no, it didn't work out. But Natalie is still using astrology to help her find her perfect match. At this point

in my life, I won't date certain signs. Yeah, I'm done with Capricorns. So I happen to be a Capricorn. As a general rule, what is it like to date a Capricorn? Asking for a friend. I find that Capricorns have a hard time opening up emotionally. I wouldn't know anything about that. And Natalie is not alone in all this. Tons of people take their astrological sign very seriously. A recent Pew survey found that nearly a third of Americans surveyed believe in astrology, and lots of people think there is science behind it. In fact, many Science Versus listeners, you, have been asking us to do a show on astrology for years. And for a while, we were like, no, could there really be any science here?

But when we started looking into it, we came across all sorts of curious stuff. From the mysterious disappearance of a man with a snake to a strange experiment involving a French serial killer. So strap in for a trip to the stars. Because when it comes to astrology, there's a lot of... I'm done with cap recordings. But then there's science. Science vs. Astrology is coming up just after the break.

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my hand and helped me to do that. Edward Jones. We do money differently. Visit edwardjones.ca slash different. Welcome back. Today, we're talking about astrology. And even if you're not a big believer in it, you probably know your zodiac sign. So what on earth does it mean? And could there be something to this? As a professor of astronomy, do you ever get mistaken for a professor of astrology? Oh yes, that does happen. Even students in my classes sometimes will use the wrong word. And I think it's because that word astrology is so much more familiar. This is Professor Katie Pilachowski. She's a Leo and she's also an astronomer at Indiana University Bloomington.

Katie studies the stars and how what they're made of changes over time. So she spends a lot of time thinking about the stars. And so the idea that what's happening up in the sky could affect our personality, it's cropped up in different cultures over time. But the zodiac system that uses Capricorn and Aries and Scorpio, it was born more than 2,000 years ago in Babylonia,

a part of what's now Iraq. And they were using the stars very practically to note changes in the seasons. The stars were so important in the lives of ancient peoples in Babylonia and everywhere else. The stars controlled how we lived, when we plant our crops, when we could harvest the fruit off the trees or our meat animals if we were out hunting.

And so in a way it was just like a skip, hop and a jump from all these other things they were using the stars for to then our personality. I think it has to be, yes. And here's how the Babylonians decided who was a Capricorn or a Cancer or a Sagittarius. You see, it all starts with the fact that all the zodiac signs are actually constellations in the sky. One of my favorites is Sagittarius. It looks like a teapot in the sky. And I find that just so easy to recognize. You know, it's got a little spout, a little handle, and a little top. It's a perfect little teapot. Now, there are lots of constellations in the sky. Yes, there's Sagittarius, but also the Big Dipper and Orion.

And yet, only some of these constellations get to be zodiac signs. Why? Well, it's because to be a sign, a constellation has to sit in a particular bit of the sky. It's kind of this band in the middle. Yeah, it's pretty much the middle bit. The middle bit is where the sun is. Now, we've thought long and hard,

and we think that this is the best way to describe how it all works. Imagine that the Earth is a giant eyeball, and it's staring up at the sun. Behind the sun is a backdrop of faraway constellations, the signs. Through the year as the earthly eyeball moves relative to the Sun, the eyeball stays focused, looking, gazing at the Sun the whole time. And that means that the constellations behind it, Sagittarius with its little teapot, Capricorn, Cancer, they will change. So according to the ancients, if you were born on August 8th,

you're a Leo because the constellation of Leo, it would be behind the sun. But if we could take the sun away all of a sudden, let the sky be dark, we would see Leo. Now, astrology lovers will tell you that there's way more to your chart than your basic zodiac sign. But that's what we're focusing on today. And I'm not going to apologize for it, probably because I'm a Capricorn. So now that we're all on the same page and we know what the Babylonians were doing, now we're going to tell you how it's all messed up. Okay, so you know how there are 12 zodiac signs supposedly representing the 12 constellations that pass behind the sun through the year?

Well, it turns out that the ancients totally left one of these constellations out. So if you were born in early to mid-December, floating behind the sun is a 13th constellation called? Ophiuchus. Ophiuchus? Ophiuchus. What does he look like? Well, Ophiuchus is the snake carrier, the serpent carrier.

So he's kind of this guy with a snake wrapped around him. Kind of strange. Ophiuchus was a total badass. The Greeks said that he represented the god of healing because a snake taught him how to bring people back from the dead. And he is technically within that special band in the sky. But the reason that you don't have any friends who are Ophiuchus and you haven't gone on any bad dates with any Ophiuchuses

is because someone piffed him out. They only needed one constellation for each month. So someone had to go. You can imagine maybe why he's left out. First of all, we only need 12. And secondly, nobody can spell Ophiuchus. He's hard to say, and he's hard to spot in the night sky. Bye-bye, poor old snake man.

The ancients also played loosey-goosey with the way they divvied up the signs. So you probably know that each sign lasts for about a month, and this goes back to the Babylonians wanting a nice, even system. The problem is that reality isn't so tidy because the constellations, they're all different in size and they all take sort of a different amount of time to pass behind the sun. Yeah, so most of the signs don't last for exactly a month. Like Scorpio only sits behind the sun for about seven days, while Virgo's time, it should last for 45 days. And so the boundaries between the astrological signs

and the boundaries between the constellations don't really agree. They don't line up at all. This seems a bit fudged, I've got to say. It is a bit fudged, right. Okay, so maybe the ancients fudged a little here, a little there. But here's one final thing that throws this whole astrological system out of whack. You see, the Earth wobbles a little as it spins.

This is due to the gravitational pull of the sun and the moon, and it's called precession. And over the centuries, it changes the way that we see the stars in the sky. And this means that since the Babylonians devised the zodiac system thousands of years ago, where the constellations appear in the sky, it's all shifted. And because of that, a lot of our signs are off. So many Capricorns turn into Sagittarians and Libras turn into Virgos. Producer Rose Rimler took this to Natalie, a Cancer, who's so sure that she's a crab, hard on the outside and gushy on the inside. But if you factor in the wobble,

she turns into a Gemini. You sent along your birthday and year, and so I looked up where the sky, so if I look up your birthday in 500 BC, you can see that the sun was actually in line with cancer. Yeah. But if I look up your birthday in 1986, on the day of your birth, it was actually passing through Gemini. Does that, I mean, it seems like that might change the way I would feel about, you know, who I am. I mean, it technically should but I think I've rooted my person like I just

feel like my personality is so rooted in cancer doesn't seem like it could possibly be right well it could be I'm not saying it couldn't be it's just like I I'm denying it I don't want it to be it's what no one wants to be a Gemini what why is that oh Gemini's are like um notoriously problematic if you go on astrology like sites or like memes about astrology or jokes you're like ugh Gemini the worst for Natalie she is just so sure that she's a Cancer and that her personality aligns with it, and it doesn't matter if the stars don't. And the fact is that there are loads of people around the world, just like Natalie,

that find that what they read in their charts, it really holds true. So that means to get to the bottom of this question of whether astrology works, we have to leave the stars and study people here on Earth. So what happens when you take thousands of people and test their personality against the signs? So it worked.

It did. That's coming up, just after the break. Welcome back. We've just talked about how the zodiac signs don't really match up with what's happening in the sky. And yet, people use astrology every day because they think there's something to it, that their sign can tell them something about their personality and their love lives. So could it be true? Well, it turns out that science has actually taken this seriously enough to test it. We found a whole bunch of studies here. And one of them is by Dave Henningsen, a professor at Northern Illinois University.

I'm a Capricorn. Twinsies! I'm a goat all over the place because I'm a Capricorn and I'm also you're the goat if you do Chinese zodiac. So I've just got, I've just got goat all over me. And so a few years ago, it behooved Dave to put astrology to the test. And he was like, okay, well, let's look at it. Let's use science and let's actually make predictions based on astrology. And then using those predictions, test them.

So if you want to know if Natalie really shouldn't be dating Capricorns and if no one should be dating Geminis, all you need do is grab a bunch of couples, find out their signs, and ask them, how's it going? And this is what David and a colleague did. They recruited 550 married people and got their birthdates so that they could figure out their zodiac signs, and then asked them to rate how much they agreed with statements like, My relationship makes me happy. My partner is very good to me.

I'm enjoying my relationship. Dave then used these surveys to see, were the happiest couples the ones astrology predicted to be the best match? How about the miserable couples? Were they all cancers and Capricorns? He talked to producer Meryl Horne about it. What did you find? If astrology.com said you were at a more favorable relationship,

you were likely to be more satisfied than if they said you had a less favorable relationship. So it worked. It did. There is at least some evidence from my study that it might be effective, that it might have some small effect. Yeah. Couples with compatible signs were a tiny bit more likely to be satisfied with their relationship. And we were quite surprised by this.

But it was just one study, one Pisces of the puzzle. So we kept digging. And we found a pile of other studies saying, eh, not so fast. Now, most of the other work out there has looked at whether your sign can predict your personality rather than, say, compatibility. And David told us about one big study. It looked at people who had taken a personality test for a job application. A researcher then used this to see if their personality aligned with their sign. Which was interesting because it had a huge sample, it had 65,000 people, and they didn't find anything. Nothing. Tens of thousands of people and no zodiac-related pattern. For example, leos, supposedly social butterflies, were no more

or less extroverted on average than Pisces, who were supposedly shy. Several other papers have backed this up. And not only that, but studies find that even professional astrologers who use complicated charts more than just your zodiac sign, even they can't accurately predict what someone's sign is based on their personality. And going back to Dave's research on couples, he found this kind of thing too. Different astrological sources didn't even agree on which signs were compatible. And that really got his goat. So if I get on a scale three times, and the first time it says 100 pounds, and the second time it says 300 pounds, and the third time it says 208 pounds, I'd start to think I need a new scale.

So that kind of comes with astrology. If you're getting the different prediction from all the different sources, you have to start saying to yourself, well, maybe I'm not really tapping something that's really there. So at the end of the day, what does Dave think of all this? Well, astrology is not very scientific at all. Which to scientists, and perhaps to you, isn't too surprising. Because it is hard to imagine how the stars way, way out in space could affect human behavior. And scientists have actually looked into this

for a celestial body that's much closer to us, the moon. It's more than 100 million times closer to us than the stars in the zodiac constellations. And we know that the moon affects physical things here on Earth, like the tide. But people claim it can affect other stuff in our lives too, like menstruation, accidents, or even mental illness. In fact, that's where the word lunacy comes from. Get it? Lunacy.

But when researchers have looked to see if the moon influences any of that stuff, they find no clear evidence here. So unless you're a sea creature trying to lay eggs at high tide the moon probably isn't changing your behavior and if the moon's not changing your behavior we can't imagine how the stars that are so much further away would either. So if astrology is bunk why can it feel so true? Well, one thing that comes up over and over again is that a lot of these predictions are kind of mealy-mouthed. They're not specific. Here's Dave again.

They don't say, you're going to be hostile to children under eight. They say, you're outgoing. Or they say, you're stubborn. Or they say, you're stubborn, or they say, you're a good friend. We're all those things, at least sometimes. Scientists have shown that when we read things like this, we focus on the stuff that rings true and forget the stuff that doesn't fit. And you might not need one more study to convince you about all of this, but we've kind of saved the best for last here. It was a study from France. A psychologist found a bunch of people who were interested in astrology,

and he sent them this reading saying, this star chart, it's specifically made for you. And then he asked them, does it match your personality? Almost everyone said yes. But here's the kicker. Everyone got the exact same reading. And it was of a serial killer, a French murderer who killed dozens of people

and dissolved their bodies in lime. We ran all this astrology party pooping by Natalie. And she told us she gets it. Horoscopes are vague and you can read what you like into them. And she told our producer Rose that we're not the first people to tell her that astrology isn't scientific. I was like, we don't care, okay? That's not the point. It sounds like what you're saying is it's people kind of like screaming in your face, it's not science. And you're like, I never said it was. Exactly. That's the key. Like, I believe in science. Like, I'm not someone who's going to be like,

oh, the earth is flat. You know what I mean? It's not like that. It is a fantasy that I've escaped to. And it's a fun place for me to be when I'm having a hard time. Natalie says that sometimes she'll be in a bad place and she kind of gets in her head about it. But sometimes she'll read her horoscope that'll say, you know what? It's going to get better soon. So you read that and you're like, okay, it's going to be a few hard days, but it's only a few days and I can make it past these next few days and then things will get better. And even though I say like, ugh, Capricorns, I don't date them. Like, it's not like I'm a, I have a Capricorn friends. Like, you know what I mean? Oh, sure. Now you say it. One of my best friends, he is a Capricorn, so.

That's Science Versus. If you want to hear more from Natalie, visit her Instagram, at Stalking Natalie, where she posts videos about astrology. And while you're on Instagram, go and check out our account, at science underscore VS. We post some fun stuff in there. Also, if you like the show and want to help us out, please follow us on Spotify. And if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, please rate and review the show there. Thank you.

Hello. Hey, Rose Rimler, producer at Science Versus. Hi, Wendy Zuckerman. How many citations in this week's episode? This week, there are 89. 89. That's right. And if people want to go hunting for all these citations, where should they go? They can find all the citations in our transcript,

and they can find the transcript by clicking on the link in our show notes. By the way, what sign are you? I'm a Libra, but I'm sure you knew that. You could tell. It all makes sense now. All right. Thanks, Rose. Thanks.

Bye. Bye. This episode was produced by Meryl Horne and Rose Rimler with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, Michelle Dang, Hannah Harris-Green and Nick Delrose. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Backchecking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard.

Music written by Peter Leonard, Marcus Begala, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Thanks to everyone we got in touch with for this episode, including Professor Todd Tinsley, Dr Peter Hartman, Dr Katie Mack, Dr Kathy Cooksey, Professor John McGrew, Professor Jim Carler, Dr. Peter Hartman, Dr. Katie Mack, Dr. Kathy Cooksey, Professor John McGrew, Professor Jim Carler, Dr. Alex Storrs, Julius Bjaršar, Laura Gilmore, and others. A special thanks to Chris Suter, Max Gibson, the Zuckerman family, and Joseph LaBelle Wilson.

I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'll talk to you next time.