The New Year's predictions for 2022 have some people turning to astrology. Here are some reasons why you should avoid it.

With 2021 behind us, many of us are looking forward to what 2022 has in store. For some, this entails looking to the stars. According to astrologers, the year 2022 will bring "enlightenment, glow-ups, and some significant rebirths," with "secrets to be disclosed, marginalized people to rise up, and prospects for a phoenix to emerge from the ashes."

This would be exciting if it weren't for one small flaw: astrology doesn't function.

Astrology argues that the positions of the sun, moon, and planets have an impact on people's lives on Earth in ways other than daylight and tides. The positions of these celestial bodies when you are born are thought to impact your personality, and their current positions are said to influence events. Astrologers use star charts and diagrams of planets and their relative positions to gain insight into people's lives and the future.

This qualifies it as a pseudoscience, or a method that appears to be similar to science but ignores key aspects of true science, such as disprovable hypotheses and repeatable tests. Pseudoscience enriches charlatans at the expense of the general public and diverts attention away from the very real science that has the potential to improve the world.

If the placements of the planets do have an effect on personality, experienced astrologers should be able to accurately characterize people's characteristics without ever meeting them. Despite their best efforts, astrologers have yet to demonstrate any forecasting abilities beyond guesswork. Study after study has failed to produce proof that astrology is effective.

Others attempt to validate astrology by citing its vast history. With thousands of years of history in the ancient world, astrology has been entwined with the very real science of astronomy — the study of what exists beyond our planet's atmosphere — for millennia, only separating at the end of the Renaissance when the scientific method was developed.

Astrologers had their fair number of brilliant innovations, including as mathematics, democracy, and aqueducts, but they also had their fair share of idiotic ones. I've never heard anyone claim that just because the ancient Etruscans did it, we should try to forecast the future by looking at sheep livers.

Some astrologers say that they don't understand why a planet's position affects a person's life. This doesn't necessarily imply that it's nonsense (cultures all throughout the world calculated the length of the year long before they realized the Earth orbited the sun), but it doesn't help. And their subsequent statement that it doesn't matter whether the planets have an impact on a person's life or not belies their honesty.

Despite the lack of strong proof supporting astrology's potency, astrologers' forecasts often appear to be accurate. How is it possible?

The Barnum effect, which is the psychological counterpart of one-size-fits-all, is part of it. People are more likely to assume that broad personality descriptors apply to them, especially if the descriptions are good. In one case, the vast majority of students in a classroom claimed to have obtained a personality profile, only to discover that they had all received the same one. And if an astrologer asserts that persons born under a certain sign are afraid of public speaking, rest certain that many people are afraid of public speaking.

Chance plays a role in some of it. Consider the links between astrological signs and certain groups of people, such as Olympic athletes. Consider the fact that there are 12 zodiac signs and billions of people on the planet. Because of chance alone, astrological signs will collide with individuals and situations when they are randomly dispersed. A link between Olympic success and a certain astrological sign, on the other hand, is about as meaningful as a link between cheese consumption and people becoming tangled to death in their bedsheets.

It includes some stargazing, but not of the stars. Astrologers can use common knowledge to drive their annual predictions, as evidenced by astrologers' predictions for 2021 in 2020. It takes little more than common sense to conclude that the introduction of vaccines plus the absence of a presidential election will make 2021 "a far more 'regular' year" than 2020.

Is astrology, with its hazy pop-psychology forecasts, genuinely a problem in light of all of this? Yes.

The essentially useless prognostications and explanations for human behavior offered by astrology urge people to accept flimsy explanations rather than seek out the true reasons for the world's current state.

Simply stating that Tauruses are optimistic and calling it a day misses the very solid scientific evidence showing people born in the spring are more optimistic than persons born in other seasons. There are various theories as to why this happens (it could be related to seasonal environmental influences on pregnant moms and their developing fetuses), but none of them include Uranus's position. We can't accept handwaved explanations if we truly want to grasp how the world works.

It's also more difficult for individuals to grasp that vague predictions and declarations are nonsense.It's easy to dismiss predictions that are clearly incorrect (like as the one that the world would end in 2012 or that John F. Kennedy and his son will appear alive in Dallas in 2021), but ambiguous projections that can easily be partially true hint that there's more to astrology than there is.

And once someone believes there may be some reality to it, believers and scammers alike can more readily profit from it – "psychic services" like as astrology, tarot card readings, and other such services are worth $2.2 billion. Back-of-the-envelope arithmetic shows that one astrologer may make more than $1,000 in a single evening, regardless of whether or not astrology works.

And these charlatans of nonsense occasionally do more than merely grab money from naïve victims. After President Ronald Reagan was assassinated, first lady Nancy Reagan brought an astrologer into the White House, who claimed that she timed the president's cancer operation with the scheduling of news conferences.

Aspects of astrology are frequently compared to therapy by supporters, and it is beneficial for people to communicate their feelings and aspirations with others who care. We simply don't need it packaged in nonsense to do so.