OMG! I Met a Cute Guy, Let's Check My Horoscope!

                “Oh my god look at my horoscope!  It’s so right today!”  I giggled as my friend passed me the paper reveal the secrets of the universe to us all.  “You know I never want to believe these are real, but they are so dead on right all the time!”  I giggled reading the paper myself.  They did seem accurate, but wait, I wasn’t reading my own horoscope I was reading hers.  Maybe we are connected by the stars?  I had to go home and look it up!

http://my.horoscope.com/astrology/horoscope-sign-profile-cancer.html

                I looked through pages of how fortune predictions worked.  Throwing out tiny pieces of meaningless information to see how you react to it and then building from it.  Like in the Wizard of Oz when the fortuneteller looked at the picture in Dorothy’s basket, real fortunetellers also use the context clues we bring in with us to start to develop a story of our “fortune” for us.  To me, that is almost just as worthy as a real fortune, a person letting you know exactly the kinds of signals you send out to the world is extremely useful.  However, where does a newspaper get its clues about my own personal life.

                The fact is, horoscope predictions are actually written in such a way that most people will see them as applying to their life most of the time.  An excellent experiment performed by the professor Richard Dawkins gave out just one of the daily horoscopes telling everyone it was the prediction for their sign.  A majority of the people agreed that the fortune was accurate, except, ironically enough, a woman who happened to actually have the sign used as her actual sign. 

At any given point in our lives, we are nervous about expectations and changes in our lives, we are hoping to find love and happiness, and we are preparing for great adventures in our own minds.   As humans we are naturally prone to facing stresses at work or school, we change friends, meet new people, and help old friends through difficult times, and we look forward to new things on the horizon for ourselves and hope for success and even see it amongst failure.  Horoscopes take these aspects of our lives and give us general overriding advice on them.  The advice can apply to such a vast majority, the odds of it applying to you are strong.

But what about my personal solidified description that describes me wonderfully and that doesn’t change… Well, the thing about those are that they often include very positive wording which people tend to want to agree with in the first place.  I may not actually be the deepest thinker, but if a horoscope tells me I am, I’m not going to disagree with it.  If you read through all the horoscope descriptions, you would find in general most of them feel as though they apply to you as well!

Sources:
http://www.cracked.com/funny-6269-horoscopes/