Sun-sign columns

What it is

The newspaper or magazine horoscope: twelve short paragraphs, one per sign, offering the day's or week's outlook to everyone born within a given month-long range.

It is worth stating plainly at the outset that practising astrologers generally regard these as worthless, for a technical reason rather than a defensive one. A horoscope in the proper sense is a chart of the whole sky for a specific moment and place, involving planetary positions, houses computed from the exact time and latitude, and aspects. A sun-sign column uses one factor — where the sun was, to within about a month — and discards everything else. By the tradition's own standards it is not a reading.

Where it came from

It has a founding date, and the story is a good one.

In August 1930 the Sunday Express wanted something on the birth of Princess Margaret, and commissioned an astrologer, R.H. Naylor, to write about her chart. The piece did well enough that Naylor was asked for more, and in one of the follow-up articles he predicted danger to British aircraft.

On 5 October 1930 the airship R101 crashed in France, killing forty-eight people. Naylor's apparent hit was a sensation, and he was given a regular column.

The problem was format. A daily or weekly column has to say something to every reader, and a proper chart requires each reader's exact birth time and place. Naylor's solution — dividing readers by their sun sign, the only chart factor derivable from a birth date alone — was a practical fix for a publishing constraint. Every sun-sign column since descends from it.

So the format most people identify with astrology is not a distillation of the tradition. It is a workaround invented in 1930 to make a newspaper feature possible.

How it is used

Written to be applicable to a twelfth of the population on any given day, which requires statements general enough to fit almost anyone, phrased so the reader supplies the specifics.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the effect that makes them work is well established and has a name. In 1949 the psychologist Bertram Forer gave his students a personality assessment supposedly based on tests they had completed, and asked them to rate its accuracy. The average rating was 4.26 out of 5. Every student had received the identical text, assembled from a newsstand astrology book — a sequence of statements like "you have a great need for other people to like and admire you" and "at times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision". The Forer effect, also called the Barnum effect, has been replicated many times.

We can say Gauquelin demonstrated it directly on astrology. He advertised free personal horoscopes in a newspaper and sent every respondent the same chart — that of Dr Marcel Petiot, a French physician convicted of murdering more than twenty people. Around 94 per cent of recipients replied that the reading described them and their families accurately.

We can say the reasons these descriptions land are understood: statements that are true of nearly everyone; pairs of opposites so that one half always fits; flattering framing, which people accept more readily; and the reader's own work in supplying the events that match. None of this requires anyone to be foolish, and the experiments were run on university students and self-selected enthusiasts alike.

We cannot say people should stop reading them, and this is where a certain kind of sceptic overreaches. A daily column that prompts someone to consider whether they have been avoiding a conversation is doing no harm and possibly some good, in the way a fortune cookie or a randomly drawn card might. The complaint is narrower: it is that the column is the form of astrology everyone has met, that it bears almost no relation to the discipline it borrows its authority from, and that arguments about astrology therefore routinely have both sides talking about different things.

Further reading

• Bertram Forer, "The Fallacy of Personal Validation" (1949) — two pages, and the whole phenomenon.
• Nicholas Campion's account of Naylor and the R101, in A History of Western Astrology, Vol. 2 (2009).