Why do we believe horoscopes and fortune telling tricks?

Fortune telling – believe in horoscope: Every day, millions of people in the world consult the predictions of their zodiac sign, whether in a newspaper, in a magazine, or on a social network. They do so under the belief that the alignment of the stars and other types of astronomical “events” can predict the future and provide guidelines for day-to-day behavior.

But why do they believe in these predictions? Has its veracity been verified? Is the human being always in search of guessing his future?

According to the blog in ‘Hoffpost’, by psychologist Xavi Savin, a few years ago the only explanation for why we give credibility to these practices was the ‘Forer effect’, an experiment that the American psychologist Bertram R. Forer tested with his students, in 1948. This consisted of doing a personality test.

At the end of the test, he gave everyone a text with the same information and with general phrases such as “you need others to appreciate and admire you”, or “sometimes you have serious doubts about whether you have done well or taken the right steps”. right decisions.” Forer managed to get almost as many people to identify with these ‘predictions’.

Forer created the text from various horoscope fragments that generally present two options: “you are x, but sometimes you are y”, making practically any human being identified.

That is why, on many occasions, horoscopes are very broad and generic.

Even so, many people follow the recommendations indicated on their signs in order to try to ‘anticipate the facts’, even if they are every day.

It is worth noting that horoscopes usually give indications and recommendations (behave in one way or another or handle a moderately specific situation with prudence), which seek, among many things, the well-being of the people of a sign.

Astrology uses divination to predict the future. According to Esteban Cruz Niño, anthropologist and historian, ancient civilizations, such as those of China and Egypt, divined the future through what they understood as the force of the stars.

From this field of popular knowledge, we seek to be “always ready” for the future of days, weeks, months, and years.

But, is a person really capable of discovering the destiny of another individual?

Beyond what astrology can say about its prediction methods, there are cases of ‘fortune tellers’ or ordinary people who, in one way or another, managed to predict or approximate the certainty of future events, responding to the constant search of the human being to know what would happen.

Some of these people resort to methods that are far from ‘reading the stars’ since they use everyday items.

In 2012, Kira Radinsky, a young programmer at the Technion Institute of Technology, predicted that year’s cholera outbreak in Cuba.

At a conference at the TED fair in Las Vegas, he explained that he achieved it from articles from the ‘New York Times’ of the last 50 years, along with other informative pages. He analyzed them through a program that detects patterns of events, one after another, creating a chain of cause and effect capable of detecting probable future events.

And although Kira’s discovery was based on a complex computer program, sometimes the divination practice works with the same mechanism, only by relying on widely consulted platforms such as social networks.

This was the case, for example, with the ‘seer’ Dave. A man who, together with ‘Safe Internet Banking’, a Belgian non-profit association, made a viral video in which he ‘guessed’ volunteers’ personal data. Dave wasn’t wearing anything mystical, he wasn’t being whispered by a spirit or visited by any paranormal entity, he was just using people’s social media profiles.

In recent years, psychologists have discovered “hidden talents” in ordinary people who were previously not analyzed.

As in the case of the ‘super recognizers’, human beings recognize a person only by seeing them once. Or the ‘super tasters’, individuals who feel the flavors very intensely.

Following that line, the ‘Superforecasters’ are people capable of predicting world events with incredible accuracy. Philip Tetlock, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, carried out a project called ‘Good Judgment’, analyzing this phenomenon.

The initiative consisted of a quiz about possible upcoming events in politics. The people who made it to the final had almost exact predictions.

The research also found that not all participants knew political facts in depth: “One of the best forecasters was a pharmacist,” Tetlock said. It was concluded that it was due to a trait called ‘open-mindedness’.

Being open-minded in psychology is not associated with progressivism or liberalism. Rather, it means that a person is able to deal with uncertainty and see all sides of a problem, and, after that, point out the nearest outcome of it.

Therefore, more than a mystical or supernatural ability to predict the future, this experiment, similar to Forer’s exercise in the 1940s, showed that it is necessary to consider all the possible results of a situation in order to make predictions of a given event.

However, uncertainty is not easy to manage.

That is why human beings turn to the horoscope and other astrological ‘events’ to deal with it and create, from the popular social perspective, a guideline of behaviors and sensations (you have to be, as said above, moderate with money or wait for certain pleasant surprises).

“The search for answers to what I should do and how I should be has to do with people’s deep state of insecurity,” says sociologist Jean Paul Sarrazin, a professor at the University of Antioquia, who also emphasizes in the plan local: “In a country like Colombia, the feeling of insecurity is even greater.”

For his part, Carlos Goméz, psychiatrist and dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the Javeriana University, affirms that predictions have the ability to promote calm in people: “The mind, in general, has a part of fantasy and also a need of imagining that things can be predicted because that gives the subject greater peace of mind”.