It bothers me that astro-nomy (the laws of the stars) is the regular science and astro-logy (the study of the stars) is the pseudoscience. This is clearly backwards!
The short version is that astrology came first and probably basically began as an attempt to predict the weather for purposes of things like deciding when to plant. Planting before an unseasonably late frost could be a deadly local apocalypse for a village.
Somewhere along the way we began to distinguish scientific study of the stars from attempts at weather prediction and also from attempts at assuring ourselves that the sun will come out tomorrow because the omens are propitious.[3] So we began calling one part of our desire to look up to the heavens and wonder how it impacts our lives Meteorology ("the study of things high in the air" [1]) and another Astronomy and began turning our nose up the stuff we now call astrology even though all three of those used to be basically the same thing.
You can see evidence of this in Farmer's Almanacs which still list things like phases of the moon.[2]
[3] We remain intensely interested in trying to predict the future and in using that info to try to "bet the right way," we just have more respectable terms for it than signs, portents and omens. These days, we like to use terms like leading indicators, statistical analysis and professional opinion.
If you think about it, it's really the exact same thing, we just have access to better data and tools. When an astrologer was someone kings used as advisors, they were basically relying on proxies. Now, we have satellite imagery of storms on the other side of the planet and we try to predict their path. A hundred years ago, hurricanes just showed up without warning and this lack of warning directly resulted in lost lives.
But we scoff at astrology like "only a fool would take that seriously," completely forgetting that we have always been able to look up and infer relationships between things happening in the heavens and events here on the ground, but we didn't always have satellites and the like.
“The observation of the world began from the noblest spectacle that was ever placed before the human senses and that our understanding can bear to follow in its
vast expanse, and it ended in — astrology.”
We make fun of astrologers for being silly now not because the heavens aren't connected to the earth, but because astrologers never bothered checking to see whether or not the specific connections they believed in were true.
I think part of the problem boils down to "90% of everything is crap."
What most people know of astrology is "popular" or Sun Sign astrology which posits that all 7 billion people on the planet can be broken up into twelve sub categories depending on the (astrological) month they were born in and we can then predict that roughly one twelfth of the human race "will fall in love today!" or whatever (even though some of those people are infants).
Predictive astrology caters to the omnipresent human need to reassure ourselves that things will be okay. It's the stuff that shows up in newspapers and magazines and it has little to do with what serious astrologers do.
But it helps pay the bills for some people. So it's probably here to stay, though most of it is amazingly eye-roll worthy.
(Said as someone who actually believes in astrology, yet hates "popular" astrology with something of a burning passion.)
A very large part of astrology is about understanding yourself and your relationships to other people. Natal or birth charts are about wondering "Who the hell am I?" and relationship astrology -- also called Synastry -- is about understanding how you interact with people around you.
It's not terribly different from things like Meyers-Briggs Personality Types, which also have both avid followers and derisive critics.
I will note that both Natal charts and Synastry map out the positions of the sun, moon, planets and other points of interest and additionally examine their mathematical relationships. They don't rely on "birth month"/sun sign as anything remotely resembling sufficient information.
But what you're describing is predictive. If it were true, you could use it to predict the future personality and behavior of a newborn baby. If an astrologer was clever they would have gone around checking in on babies to make sure their natal charts were accurate, keeping a tally of the ones that went as fate predicted and the ones that didn't, but that was before science so the idea was not as obvious as it is now.
Astrologers actually do the kind of research you talk about. It's an ongoing thing and astrologers with large followings sometimes use social media to ask for ongoing feedback concerning such things.
There is a long-standing and ongoing interest in trying to find ways to categorize human personality traits and figure out how X interacts with Y. There are many systems for that. Astrology and Meyers-Briggs are just two of countless such attempts.
Here's a recent article called The Church of Interruption that actually has nothing to do with religion. It's about communication styles:
There are people who believe in astrology as a kind of religious or spiritual thing and that belief system is basically that souls reincarnate and time and place of birth is chosen to correspond to soul states and life goals.
It's not necessary to believe in that to find astrology useful as a kind of "choose your own adventure" tool for thinking about yourself and how you relate to people.
You could think of it as the oldest and most fleshed out attempts to make personality categories based on long human observation that certain traits seem to very often go together.
Astrology uses a lot of provisional language that makes it easy for people to pick and choose what parts of the personality descriptors apply to them. You get a list of traits and you go "Why, yes, I am chatty and intellectual, but I'm not shallow. So most of these traits fit me and I find this makes sense."
It almost doesn't matter if there is any validity to planetary positions. You get a menu of things that kind of go together and I find that useful and haven't found anything else that provides a similarly useful menu to choose from.
So if it's a problem with a Saturn influence, Saturn rules both limitations, such as poverty, plus time and effort. You can accept your limitations or put in the time and effort to overcome them.
Maybe it's absolute bullshit and you can certainly come up with insights like "I can accept my limitations or work to overcome them" without astrology, but I find it useful.
Sociologists can find logical explanations for the value of religion in fostering a sense of community, etc, without accepting the tenets of any particular religion. Christians will be personally offended if you tell them God isn't real and they just go to church for a sense of community, but it's not actually necessary to draw any firm conclusions about whether or not God actually exists to see a valid role for religion in the lives of many people.
Same sort of thing is true for astrology.
From what I gather, astrology is a very popular subject in Japan, even though most Japanese aren't serious believers in astrology. In that case, it appears to be a socially acceptable means to indicate birth month in a culture that needs to know relative ages to determine appropriate honorifics to use in conversation when asking people their age is unforgivably rude.
So if you all go to school together, you know you are all born within about a year. Naming your sun sign is de facto naming your birth month, which helps sort who is older and who is younger without ever directly asking that question.
For many people outside of Japan, astrology serves a similar purpose of being a non threatening conversation starter. Not believing in it too earnestly actually makes it a better social tool because it makes it no more important than social exercises like asking "What's your favorite color?" and making up personality traits that go with that.
