The following article from the fall 2014 issue of Changing Business, the research magazine of the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, examines Associate Professor Hyeong Min "Christian" Kim's finding that people who view fate as malleable are likely to seek some form of gratification after reading a negative horoscope:
What’s a Scorpio to do when the stars offer bad tidings?
Party down with a chocolate bar.
If you follow astrology but also believe your fate has some wiggle room, you are more likely to engage in indulgent behavior after reading a negative horoscope. In other words, when your celestial outlook is bad, your behavior might be as well.
So concludes a study by Johns Hopkins Carey Business School Associate Professor Hyeong Min “Christian” Kim, “The Interactive Effect of Beliefs in Malleable Fate and Fateful Predictions on Choice,” which appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research last April. Kim was the lead writer of the article, joined by co-authors Katina Kulow and Thomas Kramer of the University of South Carolina.
It’s easy to mock astrology as a silly form of superstition — spurious pseudoscience good for a laugh, not for planning your life. Shakespeare himself told us that our fault “lies not in our stars.”
But here’s the thing: Millions of Americans read their horoscopes every day. The 12-part, Aires-to-Pisces snippets of birthday-based fate continue to appear in major newspapers and magazines, and on all sorts of websites. Nearly one in three Americans say they believe in the zodiac, according to a recent poll.
“These are numbers the world of commerce might not want to ignore,” Kim says. “No one had really looked at the potential effect of reading horoscopes on personal behavior. And if something influences consumer behavior, then that should have business implications.”
The findings are based on a pair experiments. In the first, some 180 people at a shopping mall were asked to evaluate what they were told was a new Internet horoscope service. Participants received a negative horoscope reading indicating the stars were misaligned for them — “this is not a favorable day,” and so forth. They were then asked how flexible they believed their fate to be — on a 1-to-7 scale, from totally rigid and fixed, to quite malleable and changeable. Finally, they were asked a question with what the researchers considered to be an “indulgent” or a “virtuous” answer: What would you rather do today, go to a party or clean your house?
The people who saw their fate as malleable were nearly twice as likely as others to opt for the party instead of the broom and dustpan. The findings surprised Kim, who thought the natural reaction would be to try and counter the negative prediction with the more virtuous activity. “You would subconsciously think, If I do good things, maybe somebody up there will help me, or something like that,” Kim explains
To learn more, a second and more involved experiment was conceived, again involving people asked to evaluate a new horoscope service (only this time it was all done online). Both favorable and negative horoscopes were given, and participants were also asked to write down any thoughts they had after reading their horoscopes. The indulgent/virtuous option this time was selecting to eat a chocolate bar or a granola bar.
Again, those who consider fate to be flexible, and who had received negative horoscopes, were the group most likely to opt for the “indulgent” option and yearn for chocolate. They were also much more likely to have written at length about their horoscope, sometimes using multiple paragraphs to rebut what they considered an incorrect or overly negative prediction. Creating this counter-argument, Kim concludes, used up considerable “cognitive energy.” So much so, the theory goes, that it helps explain why they had less willpower when it came to the indulgent/virtuous decision.
What’s the business takeaway in all this? “One obvious direct implication is that if you happen to sell something indulgent, then you definitely want to place your ad close to the horoscope section, because every day 30 or 40 percent of readings are unfavorable,” Kim says.
More studies on astrology readings and personal behavior are in the offing, and Kim stresses that a connection might be even stronger overseas. “We assume that consumers in Asia probably even more strongly believe in their fate and Chinese astrology,” he says. “Fate prediction is a huge business in Asia.”
One study that Kim has underway examines how horoscope readings might affect charitable giving. “Will people donate more after reading a terrible horoscope, or will they donate more after reading a very positive horoscope?” Kim wonders.
What the professor is sure of is that the millions of astrology followers should not be ignored by the business world. He should know, for he’s among them. Kim reads two horoscopes a day, one from the western zodiac (where he is Aquarius) and one from the astrological system of his native Korea (where his sign is the horse).
“I don’t think I deeply believe in astrology,” Kim says. “But I don’t dismiss it, either.”
— Brennen Jensen