A recent New York Times article claimed that “most psychologists agree that astrology’s appeal rests largely on ‘confirmation bias’—the human tendency to seek out, recall and favor information that confirms what we already believe.” This claim reflects a long history within psychology of reducing belief or interest in astrology to error or psychopathology. In doing so, my fellow psychologists fail to do justice to the empirical data and miss an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the meanings and purposes of astrology in people’s lives. More than this, it shows a failure to consider the cultural meanings and purposes of the practice in people’s lives, and in doing so reflects a way that psychologists can fall short of our ethical principles, in particular respect for people’s rights and dignity.
Magical Thinking: A Brief Historical Sketch
Psychological science tends to conceptualize astrology under the umbrella of magical thinking. Developmental psychologists like Jean Piaget use the concept to describe children’s propensity to think animistically and see relationships between objects in non-causal terms, for example seeing a stuffed animal as alive, or believing that wishing something makes it true. Over time, the construct of magical thinking broadened to become a kind of conceptual garbage can for all manner of beliefs labeled as illogical, superstitious, or paranormal. Some older studies on magical thinking even included now commonplace practices such as Yoga and meditation as “extraordinary phenomena” alongside beliefs in extrasensory perception, UFOs, witchcraft, and—yes—astrology.
Historically, magical thinking in adults has been presumed to reflect cognitive error and illness. Sigmund Freud imported the anthropologist E.B. Tylor’s definition of magic as “mistaking an ideal (i.e., mental, ideational) connection for a real one” and linked magical thinking to neurosis. This link is not entirely unfounded: measures of magical thinking do correlate modestly with certain types of psychopathology, such as psychosis, schizotypy, and obsessive-compulsive traits.
Conceptual and Empirical Problems
Many problems exist with this view of magical thinking. First of all, the construct derives from the colonialist worldview of 19th century anthropology, which views magical thinking as a vestigial remnant of the mistaken thinking to which so-called “primitive races” were prone. Early psychologists imported this worldview, and viewed children’s cognition as initially mirroring the erroneous thinking of “primitives” but developing over time into rational scientific thought. Nowadays, of course, anthropologists consider the term “primitive” to be anathema, given its historical use to denigrate non-Europeans as beastlike or inferior, but traces of scientific racism remain embedded in the concept of magical thinking.
Viewing magical thinking as simply “primitive” or pathological does not do justice to the empirical data. Within clinical psychology, studies are mixed and inconclusive: magical thinking does not sensitively indicate either psychopathology in general or any clinical disorder in particular. In developmental psychology, it is clear that childhood cognitive development does not proceed smoothly from “primitive” magical belief to “mature” causal explanation. Even in very young children, magical thinking occurs with relative rarity and coexists alongside non-magical thinking. What’s more, experimental studies have been conducted to show that Western adults who deny belief in magic can be provoked under conditions of stress and risk to behave as if they believe in magical events. On the basis of much research, the psychologist Eugene Subbotsky has argued magical thinking does not mature out of us, but is driven outside of conscious awareness by cultural pressures.
The historical intransigence of magical thinking across cultures should also give us pause. If magical thinking served no adaptive function or purpose in human life, we would be hard pressed to explain its persistence. Indeed, religion, spirituality, and magical thinking frequently import social and mental health benefits. Moreover, magical thinking is natural. Human cognition can be modeled as the interplay between two processes or systems: a quick-and-dirty system that produces fast, intuitive answers to problems in real time, and a slower, reflective system that monitors intuition and corrects or overrides poor quality decisions. The psychologist Jane Risen argues that dual-process models of cognition show that that magical thinking is normative, commonplace, evolutionarily adaptive, and sometimes beneficial.
Magical Thinking in Cultural Context
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James distinguished two orders of inquiry: first-order questions focus on the nature and origin of a subject matter (e.g., religion), while second-order questions focus on its significance and meaning. Critics of astrology tend to frame first-order questions about whether astrology yields true knowledge (e.g., whether astrologers predicted the pandemic), and then reason that negative answers mean that astrology is unimportant or meaningless. Such reasoning is, of course, fallacious: the psychological meaning and value of a practice can vary and be investigated irrespective of how we judge its truth status.
Psychology has moved in recent decades towards more inclusive attitudes toward the diverse ways that people think about and experience the world. Rather than view magical thinking as a context-free, standalone procedure that appears erroneous within “our” Western, scientific, colonized worldview, we can adopt a multicultural psychology perspective and try to understand the meanings and purposes of magical thinking in cultural context.
Astrology is one of many divination practices which encompass a broad array of ways of knowing about the world. Beyond the discipline of psychology, a wealth of ethnographic and historical data show that divination practices occur in nearly every human culture, draw upon rich and complex cognitive processes, and are embedded in and reflect local cultural-religious cosmological frameworks. As a general sketch, a basic divinatory cosmology that is common to many cultures (though not necessarily universal) includes belief in pantheism and cosmic unity. Pantheism is the view that God pervades (or gods pervade) nature, or that nature/the universe is identical to God (“all things are full of gods”). Cosmic unity implies that individual beings are not only inseparable from the rest of the cosmos (the macrocosm), but reflect the cosmos in microcosm (“as above, so below”).
Divinatory cosmologies occur in many cultures. In Stoicism for example, pneuma (divine breath) pervades all things, and actions can be traced to pneuma’s movements, which reflect divine intentions, so all things act in sympathy such that each element of the physical world reflected or expressed the greater divine harmony. Ifá divination among the Yorùbá likewise takes place within a spiritual framework in which humans are seen as dynamically related to a living, organismic cosmos. Dismissing such worldviews as “unscientific” replicates violent colonizing processes and reinforces imperial power structures.
Astrology as a Human Practice
Divination also carries personal meaning and existential weight. My own ethnographic and interview-based research on Tarot divination showed that diviners brought their whole person to the practice, instilled their service with their most cherished values, and engaged in altruistic caretaking with clients in ways that bore striking similarities to psychotherapy. Moreover, participants generally did not see divination as incompatible with scientific understanding. In fact, I concluded that magical thinking—at least as psychological researchers conceive of it—was inessential to the practice: just one potentiality among many heterogeneous ways of experiencing divination.
Given my experience with the practices and the relevant interdisciplinary literature, I have no doubt that astrology is relevantly similar in all the crucial respects to Tarot: to dismiss it as a cognitive error reflects colonized thinking: a refusal to engage with a practice on its own terms and actually look and see how people use it in daily life. Astrology, like other forms of divination, is a highly complex, existentially embedded practice that people employ to engage with personal, cultural, and spiritual value systems. As such, psychologists have more to learn from studying astrology as it is actually practiced rather than by dismissing it as an error on the basis of caricatured and outmoded constructs that do not do justice to human experience.