Star Power
Whether you’re a doubter or a devotee, daily horoscopes fill some basic human needs.
Jonathan Alpert, a New York City-based psychotherapist and advice columnist, has several clients who read the horoscopes every day.
That doesn’t bother him. Daily horoscope reading “can provide structure – your morning coffee, grab the paper, spend ten seconds reading the horoscopes,” says Alpert, a Scorpio who sometimes reads the horoscopes on his birthday.
The daily message from the planets can also serve as a little push for the day. “If it says something positive, it might provide a little inspiration,” Alpert says. “It can be motivating, open someone’s mind up.”
For most Americans, it’s difficult to get through the day without encountering at least one horoscope. Most daily papers print one version. Horoscopes are readily available on the Internet, tailored to love lives, work lives, even infants. Most women’s magazines print them.
Psychology experts know why: Horoscopes can offer a little ray of sunshine into bleak lives, provide some definition to blank-slate days and fulfill the human need for identifying with a group.
Horoscopes, especially in uncertain times, offer a psychological anchor of sorts, says Debbie Mandel, a New York-based stress-management expert and author of “Addicted to Stress” (John Wiley & Sons, 2008). “When people feel destabilized in life, people like horoscopes,” she explains. “They’re looking for a raft to hold onto.”
In her experience, people in a moral muddle – they’re having an affair or considering divorce – are voracious horoscope readers. “They want to know they’ve made a valid choice,” Mandel says.
Mandel’s not a horoscope fan, but she knows she’s a Capricorn. Indeed, it’s rare to find someone who doesn’t know her or his sign.
“They’re embedded in the culture,” notes Henry Schissler, a psychotherapist and associate professor of psychology at Housatonic Community College, Bridgeport, Conn. (Schissler, who calls horoscopes “silly,” not only knows that he’s a Capricorn, he knows he’s a cusping Capricorn.)
Horoscopes, and devotion to them, fulfill humans’ biological instinct to be part of a group, whether that group is Chicago Cubs fans, Republicans or Geminis.
“Horoscopes honor labeling and our obsession for labeling, and go a step further: They help people have a really easy way to conceptualize how they’re going to live their lives,” Schissler says. “It’s all been predestined, it’s all ‘in the stars.’”
Schissler has an interesting perspective on horoscopes. In the 1970s, he wrote Planet Waves, a “tongue in cheek” horoscope column for a New York alternative newspaper.
“The advice was so specific – ‘you will walk down Forty-Second Street at two in the afternoon,’” he recalls. But the column, which was clearly marked as farcical, had fans: Readers asked Schissler, who has no astrological background whatsoever, to do their natal charts and offer even more advice.
That’s ironic, given that horoscopes’ perceived reliability depends on what psychologists call the Forer effect. Named after American psychologist Bertram Forer, the Forer effect refers to information so general - such as horoscope advice that it could fit nearly anyone.
Given that people “identify” with their star sign, they’re apt to interpret such general information to fit their circumstances. For instance, a horoscope might predict a bad day at the office; if the day turns out to be a good one, an avid horoscope fan might convince herself that the day could have been better. “”People make excuses,” Schissler says.
For Schissler, horoscope reading heads south when the daily dose becomes a life-guiding measure. “It gets dangerous when people allow circumstances or things outside themselves to define their thoughts, feelings or how they’re going to behave,” Schissler says.
Alpert agrees. He becomes concerned when clients make decisions based on planetary advice. Such reliance “signifies a lack of confidence in your decision-making ability,” he says. It also signals a bit of emotional weakness: It’s far easier to read 100 or so words of a horoscope than to engage in self-reflection. “Introspection takes a lot of work and requires one to face some pretty dark issues,” Alpert says.
None of this will prevent Mary Westheimer, a Tucson resident and Taurus, from checking in with the stars every day. Westheimer, an assistant for sculptor/husband Kevin Caron, got hooked on the horoscopes when she was in her twenties and her mother bought her a horoscope-a-day calendar.
Westheimer, now 54, reads at least two horoscopes each morning. She has rescheduled meetings based on the horoscopes’ advice; she has altered her behavior when making sales calls. “It’s a tool,” says Westheimer, who calls herself a rational, educated person. “When it doesn’t work, I won’t use it anymore.”
In the meantime, the horoscopes serve the same purpose as a cup of strong, hot coffee. “It seems a good way to get my day started off,” Westheimer says. “It sets the tone.”
© CTW Features
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Routine? Or Ritual?
For some people, a daily horoscope reading is routine like drinking coffee, taking a shower or feeding the dog.
Which begs a question: What’s a routine? What is a ritual, a tradition or a superstition? All four share something in common - they make people feel safe in an uncertain world. But they’re not exactly alike.
Routines “are who we are as people,” says Henry Schissler, associate professor of sociology at Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, Conn. Humans, he points out, are biologically routine-oriented: We’re awake at a certain time, asleep at another, and our bodies process food in a certain way.
Routines become rituals when they are articulated by a person or an entity. For example, a family might routinely eat dinner together. That nightly meal becomes a ritual when the head of the family pronounces: We always eat dinner together. “Routine is what we fall into, and ritualized behavior is planned,” Schissler explains.
Traditions, for their part, anchor behaviors and beliefs in a framework of time. “It’s how people maintain control of the past and present,” Schissler says. Deeming an event a tradition also renders it inarguable, as knows any adult child who’s heard the wail “but it’s a tradition!” when she’s tried to skip out on a traditional holiday meal.
Superstition introduces an element of the unknown into routine. A cook might routinely throw salt over her shoulder when she spills some; such behavior offers consolation that “there’s some control over the unknown,” Schissler says.
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