Verified by 
Personality
Can Astrologers Actually Tell Us Anything About Ourselves?
We put 152 astrologers to the test. Here is what we found out.
Updated February 6, 2025 Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
Key points
- We tested 152 astrologers who believed they would do better than chance when predicting someone's personality.
- Despite their high degree of confidence in their performance, astrologers performed no better than chance.
- More experience with astrology had no statistically significant association with better performance.
- There was very little agreement among astrologers about which natal chart belonged to each person.
Last year, we ran a study testing whether astrological sun signs (like Scorpio and Capricorn) can predict any of 37 facts about a person’s life, such as their educational level and number of close friends. We found that whereas some personality tests had a reasonable ability to predict many of these facts, zodiac signs couldn’t predict a single one of them.
When we released the result, several astrologers were angry at us. They pointed out that sun signs are just tabloid astrology—real astrologers use much more complex systems involving a person’s entire astrological chart.
And they were right! Inspired by their critique, we enlisted six astrologers to help us design a new study to test astrology itself, as practiced by astrologers, rather than the silly, tabloid version of it. To make the challenge more interesting, we offered a $1,000 prize to the first astrologer who could perform sufficiently well on our test.
Can Astrologers Do Better than Chance when Predicting Someone's Personality?
There are many different types of astrology, so this study sought to test a claim fundamental to nearly all of them, which is that a person’s natal chart (reflecting the positions of celestial bodies at the time of their birth) offers insights about that person's character or life.
The test, which remains publicly available so that anyone can use it to test their own astrology skills, consists of 12 multiple-choice questions. For each question, participants are shown a great deal of information about one real person's life, reflecting a real person’s answers to 43 different questions. These questions were chosen by asking astrologers what they would ask someone if they wanted to be able to accurately guess that person's astrological chart.
Here are a few examples of pieces of information that were provided about each real person:
Alongside this information about each real person, astrologers were shown five astrological charts. Only one of these was the real natal chart of that person (based on their birth date, time, and location), and the other four were "decoy" charts that were generated based on random dates, times, and locations. The astrologer’s task was to determine which one of these five charts was the real one.
Here's an example of the decision the astrologers had to make:
In total, we tested 152 astrologers who believed they would do better than chance at the tasks we gave them; we excluded participants who lacked any astrology experience as well as those who didn’t believe that they would perform better on the tasks than random guessing.
Someone guessing at random would, on average, correctly answer only 2.4 questions out of 12. Despite their high degree of confidence in their performance, astrologers as a group performed no better than chance—that is, their distribution of results closely resembled what you'd see if they had all been guessing at random. And the number of charts they matched correctly, on average, was not statistically significantly different than random guessing either.
Not a single astrologer got more than five out of 12 answers correct—even though, after completing the task, more than half of astrologers believed they had gotten more than five answers correct.
More experience with astrology had no statistically significant association with better performance, and the astrologers with the most experience didn't do any better than the rest.
Do astrologers agree with each other?
Quite surprising to us, there was very little agreement among astrologers about which natal chart belonged to each study subject. The astrologers who reported the greatest expertise had the highest level of agreement, but they still only agreed with each other 28 percent of the time—whereas if they had been selecting charts at random, they would have agreed 20 percent of the time.
The agreement rates among astrologers are very low, ranging from about 21 percent to 28 percent, depending on experience level. This suggests there is little consensus among astrologers when interpreting the same charts, even among those with high levels of experience.
Final thoughts on our scientific test of astrology
This study was designed in partnership with astrologers, to conduct a fair test of astrology, such that it would show support if astrology is valid, and show a lack of support if astrology is not. If astrology works, we want to believe that it works—whereas if it doesn’t work, we want to believe that it doesn’t. And we sought to design and conduct this study in a way that reflects this genuine search for the truth.
That being said, at best, any individual study can only provide strong evidence related to a claim, not definitive proof. Every study, including this one, should be interpreted in the context of other evidence. And no study of astrology, no matter how well-designed, can prove that there isn’t someone out there somewhere with astrological ability. However, we believe that this study provides significant reason to doubt the claims of astrologers.
A much more detailed write-up of this study and its findings can be found here.
Facebook image: YAKOBCHUK VIACHESLAV/Shutterstock
