Who’s interested in their star sign personality?
In MyPersonality, people run the Big Five personality test and then have the option of running the star sign personality section, which compares their personality to the one that their star sign predicts. Even deciding to check your star sign personality though might say something about you, so MyPersonality had a look by comparing the personalities of people that have added the star sign feature with the personalities of people that haven’t.
You can see in the table below that people who have added the star sign feature have a very slightly higher openness trait score (+2.4%), which seems consistent with the idea that people who are interested in unconventional ideas like star signs are more likely to be open to new experiences. However, the other differences are less explainable, particularly why people on average who run the star sign feature have a lower extroversion score than those who do not (-2.6%).
| # ppl | Ope % | Con % | Ext % | Agr % | Neu % | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Star Sign Disabled | 316459 | 72.6 | 63.1 | 64.1 | 65.3 | 43.4 |
| Star Sign Enabled | 47538 | 75.0 | 61.6 | 61.5 | 64.8 | 44.2 |
Although all of the differences are statistically significant to a high degree of probability (see below the cut for the statistical stuff), is the fact that people who are interested in their star sign personality have a 2.4% higher openness trait score very interesting? Possibly not, but it does demonstrate that scientists can’t assume that people who opt-in to an experiment are the same as the people who don’t.
Methodology & Results
Only people who had answered the full personality test of 100 questions were included in the analyses. 47,538 people have enabled the star sign feature, and 316,459 people have not.
| Trait | Ope | Con | Ext | Agr | Neu | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Star Sign Enabled? | Y | N | Y | N | Y | N | Y | N | Y | N |
| Mean | 75.0 | 72.6 | 61.6 | 63.1 | 64.1 | 61.5 | 64.8 | 65.3 | 44.3 | 43.4 |
| Stnd Dev | 13.3 | 13.7 | 16.6 | 16.6 | 18.9 | 19.3 | 14.6 | 14.8 | 16.4 | 16.3 |
| t score | 36.7553 | 18.8879 | 28.3126 | 6.7564 | 10.0869 | |||||
| p value | < 0.0001 | < 0.0001 | < 0.0001 | < 0.0001 | < 0.0001 | |||||
ope = openness; con = conscientiousness, ext = extroversion, agr = agreeableness, neu = neuroticism
Of course, even though the results are all extremely statistically significant (p < 0.0001 means that there’s less than a 1 in 10,000 chance that the difference between the two groups occurred by chance), almost all results are significant when the smallest group has 47,000 people in it!
Instead of star signs, you should give an option to search by Jungian personality types. I’m an ENTP and while I can find people similar to me, all of them are ENFPs–I’ve only managed to find two ENTPs.
That’s a nice idea, I will look at implementing this!
Hi
What would this combination of star sign, ascendant and moon sign mean?
great idea to do a comment. but who knows what to commment about. please tell me my personality results. :-)
Feed back…. it doesn’t have any corrective answers for those of us born under the 13th zodiac signs. yes, I said that correct :13th zodiac signs. That is why so many of us came up empty scored. It just shows others that the stats are a bit off. Therefore those of us are the real aliens that posses the real knowledge of the cosmos. Thank you for your time .