You would like to know yourself better, to find out what is your personality, how you’re seeing the world, and what is characterizing you. Psychology is usually the field that is supposed to help you to find out with therapy during a few months or few years. Self-improvement can also be a clue to developing personal abilities, dreams, or quality of life for yourself. You can dive into meditation as well, to let your thoughts of your subconscious go out. Or if you are too lazy for meditation, not ready for therapy, or just not confident about self-improvement you could just trust astrology, personality test, blood type test to understand better your attitude to life, and your character. But should we trust what they said about us according to the fact that scientists are septic about their veracity and attendance? In short, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of all these tests. 

Last week, I was talking with a friend of mine about a new test online that I heard: the five languages of love. It’s a quiz which asks how you behave in your relationships, and how you react and express in front of love. In five languages of love, one is for you and defines your way of how you’re acting in your love life. Well, when I did this test, I was thinking directly that it was totally stupid, and how people could trust in that. Far be it from me to take a judgemental approach, I was just curious to understand how people felt about what these tests were telling them. I started to check what science, and psychology was explaining to me about them, and I wanted to understand this astrological phenomenon. 

Firstly, there is a sociological reason for this, since birth and during all our life we have some determinisms and different socialisations that put us in some cases. It also depends on what our parents are doing in their life, what we are studying, and in what environment we’re growing up. Including the sociology of classes which explains how social classes perpetuate the capitalistic system. But let’s go back to our psychological test because what I want to show you is that everyone, even me, has to belong to a category, to a case. After all, it’s what we know since we arrived on earth, in this society that divides us.

Then, it’s also easy to understand why people are following horoscopes or astrology, and listening to personality tests. It can be comforting, reassuring, to belong to something, and that someone or something is explaining your personality, and why you’re acting in this way, or behaving like this. And I think it’s the reason for the success of personality tests, and also the explanation of this trend which takes more and more space. 

In all of these personality tests, let me introduce you to the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), more commonly known as “16 personalities”. Two Americans, Katharine Cook Briggs (psychologist), and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers (novelist), wrote a book about 16 personalities which was inspired by the book of Carl Gustav Jung founding this psychology of different personality types. The test is starting with several questions about you and how you’re reacting in the world. In the end, the test depicts your personality in diverse characters: introversion/extraversion; sensing/intuition; thinking/ feeling; judging/perceiving. It’s choosing four of them, and some letters are associated, so it’s giving you a following of letters that give you your type of personality in 16 various categories. In the beginning, this test was only used in psychological tests and therapy but they found a way out and today during an interview for a job they can ask you to reply to it, social media and dating sites are using it. Today you can also put your result on Tinder and find someone who will be compatible with you, actually what the users said it’s that it can icebreaker the beginning. 

And astrology, can we trust what we read in the horoscope or what an astrologist is saying about our zodiac sign? This practice dates back thousands of years and was long considered a science. Astrology, it’s a twelve-zodiac sign, with twelve characteristics and personalities based on stars, constellations, and solar system. The astrologist will make diverse calculations observing the sky, to predict your day or depict your character. Astrology came from Latin, “Astro” for stars and “logos” for speech, it’s the speech of stars. Be careful not to confuse this with the horoscope, which is only a tool used by astrologists. Several studies show that the horoscope that you read in your magazine every morning is written by an algorithm or a freelance journalist. So be careful – if your horoscope is saying about Virgo, that today you will meet your great love, and that you’re going to achieve great success in your professional field, you will probably not…

For astrology, it’s a bit more complicated to understand why we can’t trust it. Globally, the stars have moved since ancient astrology, so when astrologists are reading stars and constellations, they are reading with this astrology which is based on ancient observations. Nevertheless, the Earth is moving, and the first point of Aries moved as well. This point is one of the two points on the celestial sphere at which the celestial equator crosses the ecliptic. So today, zodiac signs aren’t corresponding to the good constellations, for example, Aries are in the constellations of the Fishes. Moreover, we can have a critical eye on astrology and its symbolism. Zodiac signs are placed according to seasons, Leos are flaming because they are born during summer, but following Occident seasons, so what happened to zodiac signs in South Africa or Australia? 

Why are people still trusting these personality tests or astrology, or even blood types which describe character types? A psychologist experimented on his students to also understand this question. This experiment is the “Barnum effect”. He asked for all the birthdays and gave them an astral chart that was supposed to describe their personality. It was the same astral chart for everyone, and this is the thing – our brain likes subjective validation of what we believed, when we’re reading horoscopes we always look for a link between what we are and what we read. This kind of astral chart is here to seduce the audience with vague and opposing sentences. The problem is not that you read your horoscopes every morning and enjoy reading what they said about you, the problem begins when people start to need subjective and affective validation every day, and also in the professional field.

In any case, I’m thinking of continuing to do my personality tests to have fun and compare with my friends, which is my totem animal or my patronus in Harry Potter. I’ll keep reading my horoscope or calculating my ascendant to compare with my sister if we’re compatible, maybe it will explain to me why we always fight for remote control of the TV. And, I’ll keep in mind that these personality tests are stealing our personal data.

Chloé Le Cair 

Sources:

France Culture – Signe astrologique, groupe sanguin ou MBTI : a-t-on un type de personnalité?

Youtube – L’Astrologie – Les mauvaises critiques