? Social Psychology: Why do people believe in constellations?

Astrology is probably the most popular pseudopsychology. In astrology, it is said that a person's personality and behavior are determined by the positions of stars and planets in the sky when he was born. Numerous evidences show that this statement has no scientific basis at all. The following analysis can fully illustrate that astrology is simply nonsense.

1, since astrology was founded, the constellations in the zodiac have been transposed. In other words, Scorpio's position in astrology is now Libra, but most astrologers pretend not to know this change.

2. The horoscope of husband and wife has nothing to do with their marriage rate and divorce rate.

3. The research results have shown that the constellation has nothing to do with leadership, physiological characteristics, career choice or personality tendency.

At the moment when the baby is born, the strength of the doctor delivering the baby is much greater than the gravity of the stars in the sky. Astrologers can't explain why the gravity of stars is more important to babies, or why the moment of birth is more important to the development of human personality than the moment when * * * combines with eggs.

5. The results show that among more than 3000 predictions made by famous astrologers, few can be regarded as confirmed predictions. In fact, those so-called success predictions are all vague things, such as: in spring, a tragedy will happen somewhere in the East. Everything else is easy to predict the development results from reality. In short, astrology simply doesn't work.

So why are many people keen on astrology?

If an astrologer draws your horoscope, you may be impressed by its obvious accuracy. However, this feeling is generally the result of accepting obedience without thinking.

Uncritical acceptance means that people tend to believe in flattery and praise from others. Many astrolabes are designed to please people. When you see what you like to hear about your personality, you will naturally think that this description is true.

If you are a Virgo, take a look at the following description and see how it fits your situation.

Virgo: You are a logical and organized person, you hate disorder and chaos, your picky friends make you unbearable, and you lack enthusiasm and indifference. Virgo is a natural master of conflict resolution.

As a positive example, fallacy effect, in the description of astrological personality, even if there are both good and bad personality characteristics, people may still think it is quite accurate. The following is a general analysis of personality. After reading it, you may find out why people believe such things easily.

You really need others to like you and admire you. You often criticize yourself. You have a lot of potential that has not been exploited and turned into your advantage. You have some weaknesses in your personality, but on the whole, you have the ability to make up for them. You are always full of doubts about what you have done, and you don't know whether what you have done is right or wrong. You like to change, often change patterns, and are dissatisfied with constraints and restrictions. You are proud of your independent thinking ability and don't accept opinions that are not confirmed by credible evidence. You find it unwise to be too frank and let others know everything about you. Sometimes you are extroverted, you are amiable, easy to communicate and sociable, but sometimes you are introverted, cautious and taciturn. Some things you long for are often quite unrealistic.

Can these accurately tell your personality characteristics? A psychologist surveyed 79 college students who had participated in the personality test and read this passage to them respectively. Among them, only five college students think that this description does not accurately grasp their personality characteristics. Another study shows that they think this analysis of personality is more accurate than the description of constellations.

You will find that this description contains different characteristics in the same personality dimension, for example, as mentioned earlier: sometimes you are extroverted. Then he said: Sometimes you are introverted. It always sounds like there's an accurate ingredient in it. It is easy for people to have an illusion based on the fallacy of positive examples, that is, people only pay attention to the information that meets their expectations and ignore other information. Pseudopsychologists have successfully used this effect to cheat people's trust. For example, you can always find the personality characteristics described by astrology in a person who belongs to Leo. If you read those descriptions carefully, you will find that this description is actually very similar to Gemini's personality characteristics or other constellations.

Barnum effect Another psychological effect used by pseudo-psychologists is Barnum effect, that is to say, those behavioral characteristics with universality can make a description apply to anyone. Pseudopsychology, such as palm reading, fortune telling and astrology, are all using this effect to make you hear something. The more common the phenomenon, the more you can admire his accuracy. There is a way for you to understand Barnum effect. As long as you look at the future forecast of 12 constellation published in the newspaper for a few days, you will find that what will happen in the future in different constellations is similar, and they are all written in a lot of jargon.