Psychology
What’s your birthday got to do with your sporting prowess?
What’s your birthday got to do with your sporting prowess?
The Sydney Morning Herald’s horoscope for Cancerians on August 3 was: “You may receive news of a party/function. This is a fun occasion but don’t get involved behind the scenes or that could change. You’ll decide on business relating to family/home. Don’t dredge up old stories you should leave in the past. You may be distracted by physical nuisances such as noise, chattering of uncommitted co-workers or even physical pain. Relationships should never degrade you.”
From what I’ve read, Olympic canoeist Lisa Carrington (who won two gold medals on August 3) is a Cancerian, and I really wish this horoscope had said, “Today is a good day to push for the line” or (even better) “You’ll win back-to-back golds today.” I wish this, because it would have been consistent with the small and highly contested literature that says Olympic medallists had particularly favourable horoscopes for the days they won their gongs. I was also hoping Carrington’s birthday put her under Capricorn, because over the course of the Summer and Winter Olympics up t to 2018, Capricorns competing in individual events won 1202 medals, 44% more than Aquarians, their closest c zodiac rivals with 829 medals. Capricorns have almost twice t as many golds as athletes from any o other star sign.
The prolific (although mostly cancelled for good reason) British personality psychologist Hans Eysenck became interested in horoscopes in the 1970s. Part of that inspiration came from reading the work of French psychologist Michel Gauquelin, who had popularised a “Mars effect” – a relationship between the position of Mars relative to Earth’s horizon at the time of birth
Those people who received favourable horoscopes performed better on cognitive tasks.
and life success of a large group of military leaders and sportspeople. Gauquelin collected a bunch of data on where and when a large, diverse group of highly successful people had been born, calculated the position of key planets at time of birth and showed that sportspeople are more likely to be successful when Mars was astrologically important, compared with when it wasn’t
(or when another planet was).
Given his interest in personality, Eysenck looked for any evidence that zodiac signs reliably predicted aspects of personality. One notable collaboration, with Jeff Mayo (of the Mayo School of Astrology in England), involved administration of Eysenck’s Personality Inventory to 2324 British adults who had sought (and one assumes paid for) an astrological reading.
Mayo and Eysenck predicted that, consistent with astrological theory, Aries, Gemini, Leo, Libra, Sagittarius and Aquarius (“oddnumbered” signs) would be more introverted than Taurus, Cancer, Virgo, Scorpio, Capricorn and Pisces (“even-numbered” signs) and that’s exactly what the results purported to show. Extroversion scores for the “odds” were all below the population average, and all scores for the “evens” above.
Capricorns competing in individual events won 1202 medals, 44% more than Aquarians, their closest zodiac rivals.
Case closed in favour of astrology?
Regarding the “Capricorn Effect”, Capricorns overlap the last third of December and two-thirds of January. There are robust dateof-birth effects for sports success: people born early in the selection year are more successful because they’re older and bigger than the rest of their sporting age group. This effect is marked in youth sports and continues into adult sporting success.
But some horoscope effects may be psychological. A conglomerate of Belgian and US researchers led by psychological sciences researcher Magali Clobert have investigated “expectancy effects”: how positive or negative horoscopes influence the way people interpret events and their performance in cognitive and creative tasks.
Basically, the researchers randomly allocated positive or negative horoscopes to about 600 people, then looked at how this affected their performance. Not only did those who received favourable horoscopes interpret ambiguous events more positively and perform better on cognitive and creative tasks (a kind of placebo effect), but also people who came into the experiment already believing in astrology showed stronger mood-elevation effects.
I’m a Libran, and it doesn’t look good for my medal hopes. Librans are 9th on the all-time medal table.
It could be worse, though. If you’re a
Leo. l