The former New Zealand Prime Minister John Key had three white bunnies painted on his helicopter as a tribute to his ” massively superstitious ” practice of saying “white rabbits” at least three times every new month. Rafael Nadal, tennis champion, performs the exact same actions before each serve (shirt-tugs, hair-tucks, and face-wipes)
. Taylor Swift uses “13” to paint her hand before shows for luck, while Rihanna will not allow any yellow items in her dressing-room. You may be superstitious too.
You may have a superstitious number or avoid black cats. Or you might be afraid to open an umbrella inside. If you’re not superstitious but still do things such as knocking on the wood, crossing your fingers, or saying “bless you” when you sneeze, these are examples of superstitious behaviors. Humans are especially susceptible to superstitions. Why are humans so susceptible to superstitions? Do we really believe that they bring us good luck or bad luck ?
Our new research aims to address this question. This helped us understand the roots of superstition. Related: Superstitions, myths and lore can influence your subconscious – these biases have real consequences.
Cause and Effect
Infants begin to learn about this concept as young as 4 months old. Kicking their legs will shake the crib. Shaking a rattle produces an intriguing sound. Dropping a toy means that mum or dad will pick it up. We become more aware of the cause-and effect relationships as we age. This ability to understand causes and their effects is the foundation for many important milestones in development, such as imaginative play, planning to reach a goal and anticipating others’ intent, anticipating emotions and working with others. Human cognition is defined by the ability to understand relationships between cause and effect. How does this fit with our tendency to be superstitious?
Cause and effect can be an illusion.
Experience teaches us about the relationship between causes and effects. We learn the connection between our actions and their outcomes when we see our behaviors followed by a result. This action-outcome pair occurs more frequently, and the perception of a link is stronger.
We repeat actions that lead to rewarding results and refrain from repeating those that do not. What happens when an action is followed by a positive outcome? It’s likely that if I wear lucky socks, and then my favourite sports team wins it was just a coincident (it is unlikely the wearing of my socks caused them to win). If this occurs a number of times, it may lead to a belief that my socks are lucky.
It suggests that superstition is a result of our inability to distinguish between when we cause an event and when it just happens. It’s a popular explanation of superstition, but is it true?
Test our ability to determine causality.
By asking the people, we can find out what is driving superstitious behaviour. “who caused that outcome?”If we get it right, this would indicate that we are able to discern the relationship between action and outcome (and there is therefore another explanation for superstitious behaviour). This is exactly what our research showed. Our research asked people if they could determine whether their actions caused or did not cause a result.
For a credit course, we recruited 371 students to participate in an experimental session. The participants played a video game in which a win or loss was determined either by their actions (clicking on a button) or independent of them. Participants were not informed beforehand whether the outcome would be dependent on their actions or if they had won. They had to depend on their actual experience during the game to determine whether or not they were responsible for the result. The results were not affected by participants’ superstitions or other factors (like age). The behavior of the participants during this task was typical for human behaviour in general. The scores of participants showed that they were often right. In about 80% trials, the participants knew whether they had caused or not.
Built-in biases
Sometimes the distinction between what caused and did not cause outcomes was very subtle. It was therefore more difficult to determine what actually happened. Participants would say “I caused it”when they were unsure, despite the fact that they had not. After winning, they were more inclined to blame their actions for the outcome.
The bias could be the reason we are superstitious. I’m sure that something I’ve done caused something, but I’m not certain what. It also suggests that knowing superstitions don’t exist may not stop us from acting superstitously. This may seem counter-intuitive at first glance — why spend energy on things that don’t matter? If we dig deeper, we find that this bias is important, as it ensures we do not miss potential links between our actions, and the outcomes. It’s always better to be on the safe side than regret. Researchers have found that superstitious behaviors can increase our confidence, help us perform better in various tasks and reduce anxiety.
As we discovered, the tendency to ascribe positive results to our actions can increase self-esteem. We could all gain from a bit of superstition. Touch wood.