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by christiangenco 675 days ago
I did a similar experiment with my sister a few years ago and got nearly identical results.

We'd gotten into a discussion about how neither of us believe the explanation that astrology gives for how it works (that the position of the planets at the time of your birth influence your personality) but my sister thought a person's star sign might be a proxy for being born in a particular season which could reasonably affect someone's personality (ex: perhaps babies born in the winter share personality traits distinct from babies born in the summer).

She also thought that given a list of people and descriptions of personality traits of star signs she could match them with better-than-chance accuracy.

We made a list of ~10 people that she knew personally. I looked up their star signs and found a description of all 12 signs from an authoritative-looking astrology site. For each of the 10 people I gave her a choice of their actual star sign and two randomly picked star signs (determined and shuffled by an RNG). Random guessing would predict she'd have a 1/3rd chance of getting any individual person correct. She predicted she'd get ~7/10 correct.

She got exactly 3/10.