-
Asked by anon-215228 to Kathryn, Ian, Chris, Bogdana, Alex on 19 Jun 2019.
Question: Do you believe in things like birth stones and horoscopes?
- Keywords:
-
-
Bogdana Huma answered on 20 Jun 2019:
I’m not sure what birthstones are.
I don’t believe in horoscopes (anymore). I used to, to a certain extent, when I was younger. I didn’t believe in the daily ones. They all sounded so random and if you read them in different papers they would contradict each other. However, I thought there was at least a ‘kernel of truth’ in the ones that describe the main characteristics of your sign, and the compatibilities between signs etc. What made me change my beliefs was a book by Michael Shermer called ‘Why People Believe Weird Things’ which ‘busts’ a lot of myths around various false beliefs. Shermer explains not only why some things just couldn’t be true, but also why we ‘need’ these beliefs and how they help us (by reducing uncertainty about our lives, by helping us take decisions etc.). Although it doesn’t address mainly horoscopes, after reading the book, I started to think more critically of horoscopes and their claims. I started to mistrust horoscopes and stopped reading them.
-
Chris Fullwood answered on 20 Jun 2019:
Definitely not. They both work on the same principle, something Psychologists call the Barnum effect — named so because the famous circus ringmaster PT Barnum coined the phrase ‘there’s something for everyone’. So basically, people will read into horoscopes what they want to see if they’re motivated enough to look for it, but that doesn’t mean that there’s any truth to it. They also work on something called confirmation bias, i.e. people will remember the things that confirm what they already think but forget the things that contradict their ideas. So if you daily horoscope only had one piece of information in it that was correct and 5 which were incorrect, the tendency is to remember that one piece of correct information.
Comments