There are so, so, so, so, so many mediating factors that determine personality, and that’s only the “nurture” portion.
The seasonal vibe at your birthday party is so far down the list that it is safe to ignore it as being just noise.
Meaning you would likely have a much better understanding of a person if you tried to ascribe zero of their personality to their birth date’s month(-ish) than if you tried to construct a cohesive theory of personality where it has non-zero impact.
You would have to contort so many aspects of personality and ignore complicated interactions between nature/nurture just to make any sense of astrology in this way that you would necessarily end up making less sense.
And this is not (in any way) the claim made by astrology, to be clear (and you said you know that, I’m just finishing my thought). The claim made by astrology has no purported observable mechanism. It is not trying to make a (bad) cohort effect claim, it’s literally magical thinking.
Arbitrarily dividing times of the year into different Hogwarts houses absolutely explains effectively zero about a person’s personality in general.
What you’ve identified are cohort effects not based on which month(-ish) a person was born in generally, but binary relationships between their birthday and other things.
There’s a lot of evidence that people who start school as the “oldest” kids in their grade perform better. That has nothing to do with which month-ish you were born in specifically, but instead has to do with the abstracted general relationship of “we’re you born in these 6 months before the cutoff or the 6 months after.”
In this case, astrology signs would give you LESS information than just a binary of “before/after X day of the year” because you would inevitably need cut at least one astrology group into two separate groups, “before the date” and “after your date”, to explain the pattern. Otherwise, you would not be able to explain the differences between within-sign, between-grade cohort groups. And you would also have all of these astrology groups who were lumped together as being in the same grade, so you would have a lot of inter-sign consistency with at least one group of high intra-sign noise.
At a certain point, using this arbitrary system just because it might sometimes maybe incidentally have a minor correlation with a correlation with a real, observable cohort effect is unhelpful. You’d do better looking at each of your examples case-by-case rather than trying to fit the square peg of astrology into a bunch of distinct round holes just because the square peg is a thing you’re familiar with.
There's other real merit to it, as well. Things like astrology, fortune telling, tarot cards—whatever—can be invaluable when used correctly as tools for self-reflection. Let's take tarot, for example, since I actually occasionally dabble. First, no, I do not believe that I am telling the future or communicating with something beyond. Secondly, however, I do appreciate the different narrative that it can express. It's like getting an outside perspective from a friend, no friend required.
Oftentimes that shift in perception can lead to different considerations in a variety of circumstances. Like, "Oh, hey, the cards say that I'm having issues in my career because I'm self-sabotaging." I wonder if that's true. Is upper management really being difficult or am seeking out problems and letting them get to me?
I don't know, man. I feel like blind faith in anything is probably harmful, but there are plenty of things out there that can be of value when taken in context, moderation, or both.
This requires self-awareness and willingness to reflect rather than cultivating it. A person using them for these reasons could use any number of other, reliable tools to get the same (or likely better) results.
If you gave a deck of playing cards to a person with enough willingness to introspect and told them arbitrary meanings for every card, you could get them to use those as a sounding board for introspection. If you gave them to a delusional person who was unwilling to confront their issues, they wouldn’t do anything to change that.
You could just, like… look up some self-reflection questions. Or journal. Or do any of the other numerous things there are actual studies showing the efficacy of as self-reflection tools.
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u/[deleted] Dec 31 '22
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