Superstitious?

I’m not superstitious. Before I give my view on the whole matter, I encourage all of you who have any slight inclination towards superstitious behaviour to pick up, now, a copy of Stuart Vyse’s book entitled Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition. I have never been superstitious though I have early recollections of my Mum encouraging me to touch wood if anything bad was said. I quickly reduced this behaviour to a joke by touching my head one day in response to the instruction. Since then it has been a fascination of mine to witness people’s lives dictated by superstition. I marvel at friends and colleagues counting magpies, avoiding ladders, cowering at black cats and screaming at broken mirrors when all that’s happening is a false conception of causation, a particular form of irrational behaviour.

For me superstition is a way of thinking about the world that ensures we have a handle on the unknown or uncertain. A perfect illustration of this comes from an anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, who spent four years, in 1914, living amongst the Trobriand islanders, off the coast of New Guinea. There he found that scientific knowledge and magical thinking existed side by side. The Trobrianders who fished in calm lagoon waters used standardised and tested methods of catching. Alternatively, the islanders who sailed out to open sea and fished in unsafe, unpredictable waters performed detailed magical rituals to make certain they returned safely with a healthy catch.

It can also be used in less dramatic contexts. Consider, for example, the gambler sitting at a roulette wheel habitually crossing his fingers or rubbing a talisman. It is not a dangerous situation like the fishing scenario described above (unless he’s gambling all his money, house, car, job, wife, kids, dog etc., on where the ball stops). In fact the gambler is probably aware that there’s a chance he may not win. So why is he indulging in superstitious behaviour? It is still another case of someone trying to get a handle on the unknown. The outcome is unknown but if he can somehow steer the outcome in his favour, all the better. By using a talisman or having a superstitious ritual he feels he is increasing his chances. If he does win then it merely reinforces the superstitious behaviour and if he has no knowledge of how random occurrences work or how to judge probability and coincidence then it adds to a reliance on superstitious rituals. Let’s take a simple example – if you throw a die and are betting on 2, 4, or 6 coming up, what are the chances you’ll win? You’ve got a 50/50 chance of winning. The same as betting on ‘heads’ landing face up when you flip a coin. Assuming it is a fair die, or a fair coin (i.e. not fixed), with each throw the chances never change. Yet a misunderstanding of probability would lead people to believe that if there had been a run of 6s then on the next throw a 6 is least likely. The same way that if you had a run of ‘heads’ you would expect ‘tails’ to appear on the next throw, though ‘heads’ is equally likely (in a manner of speaking). A gambler betting on even numbers turning up on a die, who is using a superstitious habit, could possibly attribute a reoccurring 6 to his actions rather than simple probability.

Probability & the Paranormal

A few years ago I looked at this concept of probability judgement. There is the often quoted idea that believers in the paranormal, and also perhaps generally superstitious people, are less accurate in probability judgement than non-believers. In a book from 2001 entitled Parapsychology: The Science of Unusual Experience, in which various parapsychologists contribute chapters on their areas of speciality, two authors even go so far as to state “specifically, the believers are more likely to underestimate the probability of a chance event…Believers may thus tend to misperceive chance events as being beyond coincidence.” But where does the evidence for this come from?

Back in the 1980s the renowned sceptic, Susan Blackmore, proposed that belief in the paranormal (and hence superstition) could be explained by a sort of misjudgement whereby some individuals tend to consistently underestimate the chances that coincidences will occur (e. g. a prophetic dream of an accident). This idea was extrapolated from the work of Kahneman and Tversky who said that probability judgements, generally, are notoriously inaccurate. According to Blackmore’s idea, such low subjective probabilities lead believers to seek paranormal-type explanations when confronted with coincidental events, thus reinforcing their belief. Susan Blackmore presented volunteers with a number of problems (four) that entailed assessing probabilities. One of the problems was the classic “Birthday Paradox”. The Birthday Paradox goes like this – How many people would you have to have in a room for there to be a 50/50 chance that 2 of them share exactly the same birthday?

Her study showed that there was a difference between believers and non-believers but on only one of the probability problems, the Birthday paradox. This result, however, failed to replicate in a later study by Susan Blackmore and a colleague who was an applied mathematician. Two other psychologists, in 1999, presented participants with the same problems among other probabilistic tasks. They found no link between probabilistic reasoning scores and degree of belief. Susan Blackmore, herself, even stated in 1994 following a newspaper survey, that “The probability misjudgement hypothesis suggests that sheep [believers] should generally be worse at estimating probabilities than goats [non-believers]…this was not found and the difference scores are remarkably similar for sheep and goats.” Despite this, over 20 years after Susan Blackmore’s original study, the argument about probability and paranormal belief is still put forward by cynics. Do you know the answer to the Birthday Paradox? Whether you believe in the paranormal or not, are superstitious or not, you’d still be surprised by the answer. 23
As a little postscript to this chapter, I just have to clarify one fascinating fact. Triskaidekaphobia is the fear of the number 13, or more specifically fear of things associated with the number 13. Although a phobia of Friday 13th does come under this remit, the actual term for a morbid fear of that particular day is either friggatriskaidekaphobia (frigga referring to an ancient Scandinanvian fertility and love goddess who was worshipped on a Friday) or paraskevidekatriaphobia (a term coined by the fear specialist Dr. Dossey who claims that if you can pronounce the word you are cured – I’ve yet to see the evidence though)!

© Ciaran O'Keeffe
www.theparapsychologist.com
www.theschoolofparapsychology.org