myPersonality Research

Users who add the star sign personality feature are asked:

With the caveat that people who opt-in to the myPersonality star sign feature are not necessarily the same as people who do not, we can have a look at the frequency graph for star sign belief.

1 = strongly disagree, 2 = slightly disagree, 3 = no opinion, 4 = slightly agree, 5 = strongly agree.

As is shown, just 4.6% of respondents believed strongly in the ability of horoscopes to provide information that would be useful to guide a decision, compared to 23.3% of respondents who believed strongly in the opposite. Perhaps surprisingly though, the number of people who leaned towards a negative opinion of the usefulness of horoscope information was almost equal to the number of people who leaned towards a positive opinion (17,359 negatively, 14,791 positively). The biggest difference is that people who leaned negatively tended to have a strong opinion that horoscopes provide no useful information, whereas those who learned postively weren’t so sure, electing for “slightly agree” rather than “strongly agree”.

Method and Results
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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%).

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.

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