In our book, Signs of Life: The Origin of Astrological Symbolism and Its Relation to the Human Psyche, Polly Dukes and I discuss an experiment which showed how assessments of personality, as measured by self-report questionnaires, were influenced according to whether participants had prior knowledge of the traditionally associated characteristics of their astrological sun-sign. This has implications for indoctrinated personality.
The “sun-sign” in divinatory astrology is the sign of the zodiac that the sun was “in” (i.e., the tropical zodiac sign in the ecliptic against which it appeared, from a geocentric point of view) when a person was born. Astrologers suppose that a person is somehow ‘imprinted’ with the associated characteristics of this sign, as a summation of their general personality, throughout their lives.
The Aries sign of the zodiac, for instance, is associated with a semantically inter-related cluster of thematic attributes which can be characterised adjectivally as “self-assertive, self-promoting, forward-looking, urgent, frank, straightforward, direct, go-getting, forceful, impulsive, restless, bold, uninhibited, fearless, courageous, pioneering, showing initiative and enterprise, seeking adventure and challenge, looking for quick, concrete results, and needing to project into life actively, energetically, competitively and combatively“. Thus, according to divinatory astrology, a person born when the sun was in the sign of Aries would have a personality by and large characterised by this conceptual domain of traits.
To test this astrological hypothesis, in 1999 Jan J. F. van Rooij1van Rooij, J. J. F. (1999). Self-Concept in Terms of Astrological Sun-Sign Traits. Psychological Reports, 84(2), 541-546. asked people to complete a questionnaire which asked them to rate how well certain keyword traits applied to them. The participants were not told that the keywords used were those understood by astrologers to be descriptive of the twelve sun-signs. Following this, the participants’ astrological knowledge was assessed by the completion of a second questionnaire, asking them if they knew their sun-sign, and if so, if they could name some traits that were associated with it. The results of the study showed that participants described themselves in terms of their actual natal sun-sign—but only if they had some astrological knowledge (as measured by the second questionnaire). Participants who had no such knowledge did not describe their personalities in terms of their sun-sign.
We are aware that another study in China by Lu et al.2Lu, J. G., Liu, L. X., Liao, H. & Wang, L. (2020). Disentangling Stereotypes From Social Reality: Astrological Stereotypes and Discrimination in China. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 119(6), 1359-1379. found no associations between trait-ratings and sun-sign for “believers” and “non-believers” in astrology, but we feel this did not speak particularly to participants’ prior knowledge of the astrological characteristics of the sun-signs, as did the study by van Rooij. In the Lu et al. study, participants were merely asked whether or not they “believed in astrological signs”, which somewhat bland question did not make a confirmatory check for authentic knowledge of the characteristics of their sun-signs. In the study by van Rooij however, subjects were actually asked to describe the traditional characteristics of their sun-signs (if they knew them) and were separated into “knowledgeable” or “non-knowledgable” groups according to the veracity of their responses. For this reason we think the results of the study by van Rooij are more germane to the question of prior knowledge or “indoctrination” than that of Lu et al.
The study by van Rooij strongly suggests that sun-signs at birth do not predict personality but only appear to do so in the case of those who have acquired some knowledge of astrology. It seems therefore that exposure to astrological knowledge of the keyword interpretations of our sun-sign brings about a powerful cognitive bias, an altered self-concept, which persuades us that our natal sun-sign does indeed describe our personality.
The curiously stubborn persistence of belief in sun-sign divinatory astrology seems to suggest that this cognitive bias—an internalised self-concept in those who once begin to be aware of the keywords involved—is extremely powerful and tenacious.
In our book we argue that one reason for this is that the sun-signs encapsulate a powerfully descriptive and comprehensive array of the most basic or archetypal human traits, distilled heuristically by the collective unconscious over millennia. In the absence of access to more formal, scientific methods of personality measurement and appraisal, but nevertheless left with a strong desire to understand ourselves and our place in the world, we therefore tend to give ready credence to an internalisation of the personality of our sun-sign. This easy propensity of the archetypes of the zodiac signs in particular to evince descriptions of personality and so to foster such a strong cognitive bias is commented upon by Van Rooij:
“..astrology is one of the few, if not the only, widely used systems for describing personality at a layman’s level. It is a personality system with which many lay people are familiar, at least as far as the sun-sign is concerned. Generally, people who have an interest in personality find in astrology a simple but elaborate flexible description which makes use of the same language (traits) that people use in their daily life.“
In addition to being an interesting finding demonstrating evidence against the validity of “sun-sign astrology”, the study also poses intriguing questions about personality testing per se, given its implication that the measurement of personality can be markedly influenced by pre-existing or, as one might say, ‘indoctrinated’ ideas and beliefs.
We might even say that the study has implications for what we refer to as ‘personality’ itself, since it might be assumed that personality, as revealed (or even designated) by such tests, very commonly, if not always, has facets that could be said to be made up of prior belief systems or indoctrination.
The telling difference in self-ratings between van Rooij’s knowledgeable and non-knowledgeable groups shows that prior knowledge indeed had some differentiating, ‘indoctrinating’ influence upon self-attribution. This difference leads us fairly reasonably to assume that the knowledgeable group’s different responses were conforming to that prior knowledge; that their responses were thus not in a sense ‘real’, but that they rather represented ways in which they were ‘talking about’ or in some way affirming the self-concept bias that arose from their prior astrological knowledge.
If we assume this to be correct, then we tend to feel that we don’t know what this knowledgable group’s personality-rating responses would ‘really’ have been like without the prior knowledge, because such information was ‘masked’ by the indoctrinating cognitive bias.
We similarly tend to assume that the ‘non-knowledgeable’ group’s responses were, in contrast, true, ‘real’ reflections of their personality, since they were not biased by that prior knowledge. However, this group without prior knowledge of astrology no doubt had been ‘indoctrinated’ or influenced in other ways that might be said to affect personality.
So we can’t conclude that a trait-rating test is only reliably able to assess personality in the complete absence of prior biasing knowledge, since everyone’s personality is, in part at least, a product of some form of ‘indoctrination’, and we just have to acknowledge this when we come to measure personality by self-report. We have to accept that such a test ‘just does’ measure personality at the point of testing, however that personality has come to be shaped, and whether or not it can be said to have been formed by some biasing prior ‘indoctrination’ (which it surely has been).
For how much personality is not shaped by biased indoctrination of prior belief systems? There will arguably always be such biases and one can’t selectively discard alterations of self-concept from particular forms of indoctrination that happen not to be to our liking. Neither can one ever control for all of them (or even know them). If one could control for all of them, one might be said to be flattening the scope of personality to become nothing at all.
This being the case, we might therefore maintain that the measurement of ‘personality’ of the knowledgable group in van Rooij’s study was just as valid as that of the non-knowledgable group.
Van Rooij noted that it would be interesting to investigate whether the prior knowledge involved affects a person’s behaviour as well as their measured self-concept. If the knowledgeable group also went on to ‘act out’ the personality styles internalised by the prior knowledge, we might be even more tempted to say that such attitudes and behaviours really are their personalities; that the cognitive biases, brought about by astrological knowledge, had actually determined at least part of their personality.
We cannot of course help noting the stark difference between the group who had prior astrological knowledge and the group who did not. That prior knowledge clearly seems to have been a variable of interest to us in its power to alter self-concept, and may go some way to explaining why people persist in accepting sun-sign astrology despite a complete lack of evidence to support it.
Above all we must remember that it was not the astrological sun-sign that was the cause of such a change in personality; it was only the indoctrination about the sun-sign which caused this—a self-fulfilling prophecy of a kind which might have arisen through any number of other similarly convincing ‘doctrines’ (an ‘indoctrination’ of self-confidence, for instance, instilled by parenting, may in the same way cause actually ‘confident personalities’). The example of the indoctrination of the characteristics of the sun-sign is evinced here in order to focus on this interesting question of the nature of personality at the time of testing.
We are thus left wondering: who is to say what is ‘real personality’ and ‘not real personality’ at the time of its testing by self-report? We cannot eradicate all forms of indoctrination in personality testing, and forms of indoctrination are no doubt essential parts of what goes into forming our personalities.
So, at the time of testing, did the participants with prior knowledge of astrology, who had internalised the sun-sign self-concept enough to respond accordingly, really have those sun-sign-like personalities? By our reasoning here this seems quite possible—though it wasn’t a result of the characteristics of the natal sun-sign, but rather because of a strong cognitive bias to believe that it was.
Perhaps we can conclude that any personality is influenced by many prior indoctrinations, and that these are inevitably embedded in the personality as it is instantiated and reified by measurement, but that one of these forms of indoctrination—namely, a knowledge of the astrological sun-sign—is a particularly powerful one that can in a global sense change personality, but for eminently false reasons.
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