Science Meets the Oracle

In 1985, Shawn Carlson published a double-blind study in Nature intended to end the debate about astrology once and for all. It is still cited constantly. What is cited less often is that the study was designed with help from astrologers who agreed its methodology was fair — and that several researchers who have revisited the data since have found it more ambiguous than its headline conclusion suggested. The debate it was meant to close has not closed.

This is the uncomfortable position science occupies on the question of divination: confidently skeptical, but not quite settled.

The articles in this issue sit at that edge. They don’t argue that the systems work in the way their practitioners describe — the causal mechanisms aren’t there. What they examine instead is the harder question: what is actually happening when someone uses a divination system consistently? What does research say about ritual, pattern recognition, and the psychological function of structured self-reflection? And what does it mean that a tool can be useful without being literally true?

The honest answer is that the science on this is younger than the systems it’s studying. Astrology has 4,000 years of documented use. Controlled trials of its psychological effects have maybe thirty. We know considerably more about how people respond to horoscopes than about what, if anything, those horoscopes are tracking.

There is something worth sitting with in that asymmetry.

— The Editors