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A Study Of 20 Million People Investigated The Truth Behind Star Sign Compatibility

James Felton

James Felton

James Felton

James Felton

Senior Staff Writer

James is a published author with four pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.

Senior Staff Writer

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The stars have no influence on your love life, other than the Sun keeps you alive.

The stars have no influence on your love life, other than the Sun keeps you alive. Image credit: Peach Shutterstock/Shutterstock.com

There are a surprising number of people out there who believe that people who happened to have burst out of a vagina in, say, March are not compatible with June-born folks, because of things going on in the stars millions of miles away.

Astrology is to do with planets and stars, so sounds sort of science-y. In fact, 29 percent of Americans believe in astrology, according to a Pew survey in 2018. Though, there's a good chance they're mixing it up with astronomy.

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There have been many scientific tests of astrology, and yet zero evidence has been produced in its favor. In one famous example of this in 2007, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Manchester's Centre for Census and Survey Research, Dr David Voas, decided to undertake a statistical analysis of star sign compatibility. It's still the largest test of astrology ever carried out.

In order to do this, he used census data taken from England and Wales, looking at all 20 million birthdays of married couples at the time. 

"If there is even the smallest tendency for Virgos to fancy Capricorns, or for Libras to like Leos, then we should see it in the marriage statistics," Voas said in a statement at the time. "When you have a population of ten million couples, then even if only one pair in a thousand is influenced by the stars, you'd have ten thousand more couples than expected with certain combinations of signs."

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Hold your breath, because the results are in and... your birth month appears to have zero effect on your husband/wife choice. Like Prince once sang: "Ain't no particular sign I'm more compatible with." Voas found no evidence that people were more likely to marry someone of a specific star sign

"There's no such evidence, though: The numbers are just what we'd predict on the basis of chance," Voas said.

Voas noted that there was no link between a lack of scientific evidence about astrology and its popularity, either, adding: "The enthusiasm for zodiac-based personality profiling seems undiminished by hundreds of previous studies debunking astrology."

Astrology is as popular today as ever. Nevertheless, as he and countless other studies have concluded:

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"If [star signs] had any influence at all, however small, the giant magnifying glass of this huge sample would detect it. There's nothing there."

In short, the stars have no influence on your love life, other than the Sun (which keeps you alive).

 


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ARTICLE POSTED IN

  • tag
  • pseudoscience,

  • astrology,

  • zodiac

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