● Many young people believe in zodiac signs and other forms of pseudoscience.
● Although not scientific, pseudoscience offers a comfortable and easy-to-understand personal narrative.
● If not balanced with critical thinking, belief in pseudoscience can have serious consequences.
Olivia (27 years old) has long been familiar with the world of zodiac. She even uses a special astrology application called Co-star which claims to combine NASA ( National Aeronautics and Space Administration ) data and interpretations of the stars. This application provides personalization features and fortune-telling services through paid fortune-telling services.
For Olivia, this is important to know because the constellation she was born under may hold clues about her life path.
Olivia is one of three young people I interviewed to find out why young people believe—and don’t believe—pseudoscience, and what impacts that can have.
Popularity that transcends time
As Olivia believes, the zodiac does claim that there is a connection between celestial bodies and events on earth—specifically the personality, fate, and affairs of humanity. This belief has been around since the Babylonian era and developed into the 12 zodiac symbols in Classical Greek culture .
These claims, beliefs, or practices that appear scientific but cannot be proven to be true have proven to be timeless.
The proof is, more than 80% of adults worldwide know their zodiac . In fact, the industry in this field has a business value of billions of dollars because it has penetrated digital platforms to paid applications.
The same thing also happened with the trend of reading tarot, palm reading , and MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) which have been widely criticized by the scientific community because they do not correspond to known facts and data, cannot be tested, and have internal contradictions .
However, there are still many young people, both Millennials and Gen Z , who believe in pseudoscience. According to them, the zodiac, tarot and MBTI can provide validation for what they feel and help them understand themselves.
Believe because of ‘matching logic’
There are two cognitive biases that most often appear and are the reasons why young people still believe in horoscopes, namely: the Barnum effect and confirmation bias.
The Barnum effect is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when people believe that a personality description specifically fits them, when in fact it is a general description that everyone can relate to.
Olivia, for example, admitted that many zodiac descriptions in her birth month match, such as: uncomfortable, playing it safe, avoiding conflict. She also monitors daily quotes based on zodiac as encouragement and reminders for herself. However, Olivia admitted that she only uses it for personal use, not to read other people such as investigating the zodiac of a partner, friend, or family.
Then, there is the factor of “confirmation bias”, namely the tendency to seek, interpret and match information that only suits one’s own tastes, values or beliefs
This is like the confession of Esti (27 years old) who said that she only considered the zodiac as a fun event, even though there were points that personally matched her. However, she had a different attitude when responding to MBTI. She admitted that 80% believed in the MBTI test results because many matched her personality. While the remaining 20% doubted because sometimes the results changed: for example from INFJ ( introverted, intuitive, feeling , and judging ) to ENFJ ( extraverted, intuitive, feeling, and judging ).
External validation house
Belief in pseudoscience signifies the need of individuals, especially today’s youth, to gain external validation for the ‘voice’ that is actually already contained within them. Because, pseudoscience offers personalized things , something that modern science does not provide: a sense of worth, importance, and a narrative that makes you feel comfortable so that the sentence “this is so me” appears.
However, it’s important to remember that belief in horoscopes and other pseudoscience is always a spectrum—some believe a little, some believe a lot, some don’t believe at all.
The proof is, in contrast to Olivia and Esti, Izad (25 years old) rejects the zodiac system. In his eyes, the zodiac is not worthy of belief because it ignores various other factors that shape an individual’s character and personality, such as social class or the environment in which a person grows up. He also admitted to being annoyed because he felt ‘labeled’ as two-faced just because he was born in a Gemini month.
Izad emphasized,
“Now, for example, one Gemini is born from a rich family, another is poor, are their characters the same? Of course not. Besides, it’s a system from Greece, why is it brought here and generalized? This zodiac doesn’t care about context, whereas a person’s character is formed by the social context, where they grow up, whether in a village, or in an urban area, and so on.”
The long-term impact of pseudoscience
Belief in pseudoscience is facilitated by human instinct. That’s because our brains have been trained for thousands of years to survive , rather than to be right and think rationally. It’s no wonder that many people still fall for narratives of disinformation, misinformation, biases, and non-scientific beliefs. It’s in this niche that pseudoscience fills the gap and spreads faster by exploiting the cognitive biases that are embedded in everyone.
A 2020 study by Japanese pseudoscience researcher Yoshimasa Majima showed a strong link between acceptance of pseudoscience and type one thinking, which is more ancient, autonomous, prone to bias, and fast and intuitive.
Moreover, pseudoscience also works through the mechanism of cultural mimicry —imitating certain parts of science to make it more credible. In other words, pseudoscience works by borrowing the tools of science to package itself and gain credibility.
To counteract this, one needs to practice the second type of thinking from psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s typology: fast or slow thinking. Typology two requires us to think slower, logical, analytical, deliberative, and more reliable . Because, the impact of believing in pseudoscience can be serious such as vaccine rejection, anti-science attitudes, stereotypes based on zodiac signs, racism, narcissism, to egocentric and authoritarian mentality .
The last impact above refers to the criticism of Adorno, a German philosopher, who said that astrological ways of thinking have the potential to give birth to fascism and authoritarianism because they tend towards “conformity”, “obedience”, and a “sense of being destined-for-it”.
This underscores the need to transmit critical thinking. Here the role of the media is crucial. Instead of giving too much space to daily or weekly astrology columns , the media needs to play a role in narrating science in a more public-friendly way.
Author Bio: Muhammad Naufal Waliuddin is a Researcher of Youth and Religious Studies. Doctoral candidate in Islamic studies at Sunan Kalijaga State Islamic University
Tags: pseudoscience
