I don't know who needs to hear this, but astrology doesn't work.
We enlisted six astrologers to help us a design a new study to test astrology itself, as practiced by astrologers, rather than the silly, tabloid version of it. And to make the challenge more interesting, we offered a $1000 prize to the first astrologer who could perform sufficiently well on our test.
Despite their high-degree of confidence in their performance, astrologers as a group performed no better than chance - that is, their distribution of results closely resembled what you'd see if they had all been guessing at random. And the number of charts they matched correctly, on average, was not statistically significantly different than random guessing either.
Not a single astrologer got more than 5 out of 12 answers correct - even though, after completing the task, more than half of astrologers believed they had gotten more than 5 answers correct. More experience with astrology had no statistically significant association with better performance, and the astrologers with the most experience didn't do any better than the rest.
Even if they were getting many answers wrong, did they at least agree with each other about what the right answers were? Quite surprising to us, there was very little agreement among astrologers about which natal chart belonged to each study subject. The astrologers who reported the greatest expertise had the highest level of agreement, but they still only agreed with each other only 28% of the time - whereas if they had been selecting charts at random, they would have agreed 20% of the time.
