A flawed report: No, Americans don't think astrology is scientific

Among those that correctly identified astrology as astrology, only 13.5% found it “pretty scientific” or “very scientific”. Only 1 person said it was “very scientific.” Among those that identified astrology as astronomy, the field was overwhelmingly seen as scientific, exactly as I expected. This is the true driver of the NSF report findings. Both an independent-samples t-test and a Mann Whitney U test (depending on what scale of measurement you think Likert-type scales are) agree that the differences in science perceptions between those responding about astronomy and those responding about astrology is significantly different (U = 119.00, p < .001; t(97) = 10.537, p < .001). Massive effect too (d = 2.48)! Thus I conclude that it is invalid to simply ask people about astrology and assume that they know what that term means. Various media reports have noted that the NSF report discussed how 80-99% of Chinese respondents in a 2010 Chinese study reported skepticism of various aspects of astrology, interpreting this difference as evidence supporting the decline of US science education. Instead, I suspect that this difference only reveals that in Chinese, the words for astronomy and astrology are not very similar. 86.5% is right in the middle of the range of findings from the Chinese sample, although I expect a broader US sample than MTurk would probably be a little lower. But at the least, I feel comfortable concluding that we are safe from Chinese scientific dominance for at least another year.