Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense, I'm your host, Massimo Puchi, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Well, Massimo, this is our 13th episode, so you know what that means.

Very superstitious, but it's time to talk about superstition specifically, I want to ask what makes people superstitious and I mean that question on multiple levels.

First, what kind of situations trigger our tendency towards superstitious thinking? And then on a deeper level, why do we have that tendency in the first place?

Oh, and I also want to talk about the question you raised in the teaser on our blog. Are there any benefits to superstitious thinking?

Well, it turns out that if we start with the latter, it turns out that there appears to be some benefits. This in fact, the idea for part, the readings that I did in preparation for this podcast came from one of our colleagues and friends, Steve Novela, who actually published an article recently in June on June seven on about superstition on his blog, Neurologic and Erased, particularly this question, is superstition all bad? And it turns out that that now begins to be enough research out there that we can start answering the questions.

So, for instance, that one of the most recent articles in the on topic is in Psychological Science, published in May 2010. And the title is Keep Your Fingers Crossed How Superstition Improves Performance. And it turns out that the authors have done a series of experiments where they showed that if if you say things like break a leg, for instance, or keep your fingers crossed and so on to people before they start engaging in a particular task, they perform better at that task.

And the interesting thing about the the sort of the words, the more superstitious, all the superstition boost basically increases the performance. Now, what these researchers did was was interesting. They also looked in one of their experiments. They looked at how exactly what was the mechanism by which this was happening.

And they found that that it was increased task, persistent persistence that constituted the made for the advantage.

In other words, keep trying longer.

They could keep trying longer because and apparently the people who tried longer were the ones that were that were sort of primed with the superstitious, you know, beginning. So so if you if somebody says, well, break a leg or keep your fingers crossed or whatever. Apparently one of the results of of that is that you keep trying longer. And of course, if you try longer, you're more likely to succeed. So there's nothing mysterious about the success of these people.

But what there is, is that the trigger, one of the triggers, at least there is some kind of superstitious priming.

The thing I had also read another possibly beneficial effect of superstition, that it works through another channel instead of working because you expect it to work. And so you keep trying until it does work. It appears to work by just making you more confident and for certain kinds of tasks at least, confidence can increase your likelihood of success.

I think the study I read about had people it involved some sort of like simple motor tasks, like throwing a ball and people were more successful at it who had been given some sort of lucky charm or had been allowed to, you know, perform some sort of lucky ritual or something like that. But that at least raises the the question of whether there's a downside to this seemingly beneficial effect. A couple of our commenters on on rationally speaking, gave examples of cases in which trusting in a lucky charm could really be bad for you.

Like like someone raised the example of a snipers who wear special amulets around their neck that consist of a bullet that is supposedly like the one bullet that could kill them. And since they have it around their neck, they're safe. And so they can't be killed by bullets, which I'm sure that increases your confidence if you believe that. But I'm not sure that that's actually a good thing if you want to live to see the end of your sniper.

So, yes, as it turns out, there is some quantitative measurement of the negative effects of superstition, although the direction of causality in these studies is often very difficult to tell. But for instance, there is a paper published by Suk's in Psychological Reports.

In 2004, there was actually a confirmation of the fact that the effect of superstition, the connection between superstition and and other traits is actually cross-cultural because it holds for both for Western subjects and for, in this case, Chinese subjects.

So what were the traits but was.

Well, what's interesting is that they found a negative correlation between belief in superstition and rated self efficacy, where people tend to be less less confident about what they can do if they're more superstitious.

OK, so we don't know which way the direction of.

Right, because we don't know whether it is that superstitious people tend to be aware as a consequence of the fact that sort of. They relinquished basically control to some extent, they were less confident about what they can do or it is there instead that people were naturally less self-confident and to be more superstitious as a sort of way to to counter their lack of self-confidence.

We don't know which way the intellectual direction goes, but there are some negative effects essentially associated with superstition. And the interesting thing I found was that they apparently are cross-cultural. That's strange because I thought the common wisdom was that superstitions were a way to cope with feeling like you are in an unpredictable and uncontrollable world.

And so you see that's why you see patterns where there are none.

No, that's correct. And in fact, I'm going to study in another study in a minute to that effect. But but the two things are not mutually exclusive, right? So somebody could have less self-confidence in his own abilities.

Beans and beans. Superstition is a way to feel like he has control. I think somebody is in control. Right.

Like things happen for a reason that he's not being able to predict things and gives you some you know, if you think you can predict things and you feel like you have more control if I wear my red shirt than I will right now.

Right. But feel in control that either you or somebody you know, the universe is in control of things, is not necessarily the same thing as being self-confident, confident. So. So I think the two things are the two results are not mutually exclusive. But you're right that there is some interesting research that shows a connection between lack of control and the perception, increased perception of illusory patterns. And that's that's a paper in science in 2008 by Wetstone and Golinski.

Now, what they did, which was interesting, was they try to sort of break down the causality direction of causality and see what was causing what essentially.

So one of the experiments that they did, they were able to to show that the correlation between lack of control and illusory pattern perception was reduced by what they called a the self kind of, you know, method.

So in other words, self affirmation, like looking in the mirror and saying, I am beautiful.

I am confident something along those lines. I have not now. Probably not. But but if you somehow can boost the self-confidence of a subject, then that tends to decrease the correlation between the feeling of lack of control and the perception of illusory patterns. You know, the superstition tends to go away.

Hmm. And that, again, seems to me to make sense psychologically. And there's some interesting evidence out there about it.

So I if this is the paper that I'm thinking of, I I skimmed over it and they do a few different experiments where, as you said, they do try to sort of break down the direction of causality by by controlling the variable of of how in control people feel.

But what really struck me as I read these different experiments is that I think there's sort of a number of things going on here that have sort of been conflated, been lumped together. So, for example, I think it's important to distinguish between feeling confused, like feeling like you're in just an unpredictable and completely inscrutable world and feeling anxious or sort of having a heightened, you know, physiological levels of fear or or vulnerability, et cetera.

And so those two things often go together, like in this may not have been in this particular paper, but there's one study I read about in several places in which I in wasn't study.

But this scientist observed some some fishermen in a tropical island and he reported that the fishermen who fished in the shallow waters had fewer superstitious rituals and beliefs in the fishermen who fished in the deep waters because deep waters had more danger and uncertainty involved in the fishing. And so he saw their superstitious rituals as a way to cope with that.

And which again makes the general connection between lack of predictability, of what is about to happen to you. And I like a predictability about the environment and superstition. Right.

But what I'm trying to say is lack of predictability. Not being able to predict what's going on is different from feeling from how afraid you are. So correct. Right.

I could see like but potentially an evolutionary explanation for why, you know, when our our pulse is elevated, we tend to see patterns more readily in noise because, for example, you know, when we were when our ancestors were wandering through the forests and and had to detect whether there was a a predator hiding in the bushes or whether it was just, you know, a pattern of light reflecting off the leaves if they were in a dangerous, unfamiliar area or if they were weak and therefore vulnerable and afraid, they should be more inclined to see a predator instead of just leaves because they they need to be better safe than sorry.

They're afraid.

That's right. That's the theory. Yeah, absolutely. That that is the theory. Although, as you know, I tend to be very careful about evolutionary psychological explanations of human behaviour because, you know, that makes perfect sense, except, of course, that we don't really have a way to test whether that is the case or not.

Now, we certainly agree.

I'm just saying that there are two different channels. They are. They are. And but, of course, there is, in fact, a connection between lack of predictability and stress. I mean, you know, you are the the feeling that you cannot control your. Environment can cause distress and in the picking up patterns that are not there in the United States, being superstitious may relieve the stress.

It clearly doesn't relieve the unpredictability because you know, the superstition and doesn't, in fact, have any particular grounding in physical laws. So you're obviously by being superstitious, you're not solving the problem of suddenly gaining actual control over your environment. What you do is used to solve or ameliorate the psychological problem, therefore, the anxiety caused by that, that lack of control. Now, let's go back for a second to the evolutionary psychological aspect of it. Right.

Despite my my caveat early on that these theories, actually these hypotheses is actually very difficult to test.

But nonetheless, it does make perfect sense that there is an advantage to animals in general in picking up patterns in the ability to pick up patterns in the case of human beings. There is the additional complication, of course, that we have these natural tendency to, as Daniel Dennett, after put it, put it to project agency because we are conscious beings and because there is an advantage, obviously, in in trying to figure out what other human beings or other conscious beings are thinking and how they're going to act and so on and so forth.

We have a tendency to project agents we experience out on an everyday basis.

You know, when people get mad at their computers or their cars or whatever, we take it personally. Exactly. We take it personally when you sort of project agency.

And I take the weather personally. Personally. Yes.

There's all sorts of things that we can take personally.

And and this may be a natural, you know, extrapolation essentially of of the projection of agency, which, by the way, is one of the hypotheses about the origin of religious beliefs.

Right. The idea that one projects both causal patterns, you know, picks up patterns that are actually not there. And projects agency, if you combine the two together, what you get is that natural processes, natural phenomena are controlled by some kind of agency that is obviously much more powerful and much bigger than you are and, you know, are you have God. So it's the explanation actually does make perfect sense.

Now, speaking of autism, there is another interesting connection, of course, between superstition and autism, other than the obvious one that most atheist don't think of themselves and probably are not, in fact, superstitious.

But there is an interesting article based on published research that came out in Scientific American recently in May 2010. And the article talks about the superstitious believes in particular that the tendency to project agency, you know, sort of invoke gods or things like that in people that are affected by Asperger's syndrome.

And these people, these people tend to have a much, much lower rate of projection of agency, unknown agency than what the article, interestingly, calls neurotypical people, you know, with normal people.

But the additional interesting thing is that the neurotypical subjects in the way that are talked about in the article were actually divided into two groups neurotypical that are also so religious or normally religious believers and neurotypical who are atheists. And the idea, of course, was to compare the Asperger's with the atheists, since they both tend to have these rejection of of agency projection and so on. But they found a very interesting difference between the two groups. And I'm quoting from the from the Scientific American article, The atheist, as expected, often invoked anti teleological responses, such as the original reason why things just happened and so on and so forth.

The people with Asperger's were significantly less likely to offer such and detailed, illogical explanations than the atheists indicated that we're not engaged in theological thinking at all. The atheist, in contrast, revealed themselves to be reasonably teleological. But then they rejected those thoughts. In other words, atheists were not Asperger's. Do think theologically they do think about projection projecting agency.

They just reject that explanation because we're so used to hearing people give that explanation that we have to consciously reject it.

But so there is nothing in the brain, so to speak, that makes it less likely to think in logical terms. Is that the theological terms that analyzed from the point of view of your belief, your reasons about agency and so on and so forth, and they are rejected.

Now, just to clarify to logically means with sort of an end in mind. That's right.

That's right. And it goes a plan. It's a goal. And that it's something is unfolding according to a particular a particular ultimate ultimate goal. And was interesting, therefore, that you can show that a behavioral deficiency can actually cause turning off entirely to logical thinking. So theological thinking is something that can be turned on or off, abandoned in the brain, depending on what and how your brain actually happens to work. Hmm.

Now, if you think of the logic. Thinking as a particular type of superstitious thinking, then that also means, obviously, that there are certain areas of the brain that specifically can be turned off and would, in fact, eliminate or reduce superstitious thinking. The catch here, of course, is that I'm not so sure that we want to do that in the way in which it is being investigated in this article, because, of course, these people are, in fact affected by a syndrome that makes them also a less socially apt and, you know, capable of interacting with other human beings and so on.

That may suggest that there is some deep connection between the ability of people to socialize, which does depend on projecting agency on other human beings and the tendency of them sort of essentially extrapolating that that projection of agency outside of the realm of human beings and therefore to start engaging in superstitious behaviors.

And there's also a lot of connection between superstitious behaviors and social bonding. I think I've read about a lot of rituals, especially in sports situations, that have to be engaged in together. And they create the sense of bonding like all of the things that teams do before a match, all the like incantations.

And I'm kind of making this up because I've never been within five feet of a playing field.

But I understand that they're nothing that that sports obsessed people do that involves the position.

I would never agree with that.

By the way, Masimo, I feel like we would be remiss in not mentioning the famous quintessential experiment on superstition and pigeons, which was done by the psychologist B.F. Skinner back in the 40s.

He took a bunch of pigeons and had a mechanism set up to dispense food to them at random sorry, at regular intervals. And the pigeons, you know, they'd be wandering around the cage doing whatever little pigeon things they do, bopping their heads, turning around, and and then suddenly, unexpectedly, they would get a piece of food. And so the pigeons quickly developed an association between whatever behavior they had happened to be doing when the food came and and the reception of the food itself.

And so they would they would repeat that behavior again and again. So quickly, Skinner found himself with cages of pigeons who were just repeating these senseless motions, bopping their heads three times or turning around counterclockwise, two times, thinking that it had some effect on on whether they were getting food, which is really not much more silly than wearing a particular shirt or hat when you're going to see the Yankees than at their next game.

Right?

Well, actually, when I mean, when I read about this, at first I was like, oh, silly pigeons. But then I was like, well, they actually really don't know.

I mean, I if the food was randomly given. Yeah.

They really don't know what caused food to be given. Whereas humans, you know, when we played roulette, we have all of these superstitious beliefs that we think fact what's going to come next, even though we explicitly know that it's random.

Right. We can we can make up better stories than pigeons can. But the interesting thing is that that kind of experiment is also been repeated in rats. And it turns out that you can get the same behavior to a marriage. You can get, you know, superstitious rats.

But interestingly, rats actually become that lose that superstitious behavior pretty quickly. Once they figured out that, in fact, repeating whatever it is that they're doing the dance around or they're bumping around on the wall or whatever, once they figure out that it's not working anymore, then it's not giving them the food or the reward anymore. Then they stop doing it, unlike human beings who actually continues to be superstitious regardless essentially of the outcome.

So it's because we remember the few. Yes. So we're more open, which we do the thing and we get the result we want. And we forget all of the misses and we do the thing. We wear the shirt or we carry the charm and the outcome we wanted.

That's a fancy way of saying that we're more stupid than rats, right. There's one more study that I want to bring up before we wrap up this sort of discussion. Superstition, which is one on the connection between child childhood physical abuse and development of belief in the paranormal. This is a study that that came out in 2006 in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.

And what they found was that there is, in fact, the connection, meaning that people who have been abused as children do tend to develop more strong paranormal beliefs than people who are not being abused. And again, the general idea is that there is a connection there between the the feeling of lack of control and the origin of superstition. But the interesting thing about this study is that not all superstitions apparently are created equal in this sense.

For instance, the researchers found that precognition, spiritualism in general, where significantly higher in abuse as opposed to non abused subjects, witchcraft was of all things. Found to be the most strongly held belief among those that had a history of abuses but other beliefs, on the other hand, other paranormal beliefs did not work quite as as well. And in particular, for instance, religious beliefs were no different between the abused people and in the control group. Interesting.

So no one believes the pantry are equally efficacious, at least in this particular context. And the interesting part is that religion of all of all of them is that doesn't appear to be to make much of a difference in the case, at least in the specific case of people with physical abuse as children.

Well, I feel like we should probably quickly wrap up before something terrible happens.

This is our 13th episode. Well, lucky thing.

I carried my rabbit's foot with me this whole time to protect us from the murkiness of Episode 13. Let's continue on to the rationally speaking.

Welcome back. Every episode, including Episode 13, Jillian, pick a couple of our favorite books, movies, websites or whatever tickles our irrational fancy. Let's start with Julia Spik.

Thanks, Massimo. My pictures book just came out recently. It's called How Pleasure Works by Paul Bloom.

I really liked this book and I don't want to say too much about it yet because I actually plan to write a blog post about it. But there's one section of the book that actually turned out to be really relevant to the topic of this episode. So just in brief, the book is about how well the common thread running through it is how the pleasure that we get out of something, an object or a person or a food is not just about the the physical properties of that thing, like how it tastes or looks or sounds or or our actual experience with it.

But it's also largely based on our beliefs about that thing that don't have anything to do with its physical properties. So, for example, that's why people will get more pleasure out of the same glass of wine if they think that it's rare and expensive than if they think that it's, you know, a common cheap table wine, even if it's the exact same wine.

And they've tested this.

And it's also the reason why we get far more pleasure out of a painting if we think it comes from a famous celebrated artist than if it's a forgery, even if the forgery is so good that it's identical to the real painting.

And the reason that this is relevant to superstition is that a lot of problems, research has been about the belief that there's a sort of vague essence, an immaterial but real essence in objects that has to do with their history and where they've been and what they've been in close proximity to.

You'll see this in a lot of religious or spiritual beliefs that something can can have power or can have specialness and that that that special essence can be transmitted by touching it or by being close to it.

And and you see this in secular culture as well. So, for example, this is why people will pay so much for an article of clothing that's been worn by a celebrity or an object that's belonged to a celebrity. And so what do you and others have found is that there are these interesting rules about how this sort of special essence is transmitted.

So obviously, you know, it can be transmitted through touch. Like if a celebrity has touched something, it's worth a lot. If the celebrity has worn that thing, it's worth even more. But you also get this interesting transitivity of a special essence. So like, for example, there's a photographer who sold I think he was he was trying to photograph Britney Spears and her car ran over his foot. And so he's selling the shoe that he was wearing when Britney Spears car ran over his foot.

And so Britney Spears never touched his his foot, but she touched her car because she's sitting in it and the car touched his shoe and the shoe touched his butt. So so this is now worth a lot. It's not worth as much as it would be if Britney Spears has actually touched it.

But, you know, there's this transitivity that reminds me of several years ago, I think it was a couple of World Cups ago, soccer, World Cups that the the International Federation of Soccer decided to cut up the grass of which the games have been played and sell it in tiny little squares.

Yes. And of course, the squares that went for the highest bidding were the ones that allegedly had the spinning of Madonna, who was a major player on it.

Now, I'm not sure that I would pay a lot of money for somebody else's bit in my living room. But there you go. That's that's another example of what you're talking about.

Yeah. He actually he's also found that articles of clothing worn by celebrities are worth a lot less if they've been cleaned.

So like an auction house.

Of course, since he's gone, you've sterilized it away.

Well, my pick for this episode is a website. It's called Epizyme Links, Epistemic Links, dot com. You'll find the link on on our website. And it's a general very, very, very well put together set of resources for our philosophy on the Internet and the results of serious stuff. You can look up individual departments of philosophy throughout the country. You can look up in your faculty. You can look at a lot of interesting things, but there is also some less serious issues.

There have an entire store, for instance, where you can buy all sorts of T-shirts and caps and all that with philosophical themes. And some of them are actually very funny.

I have to admit that I got a couple of those at at home, but it's also a very serious sort of general portal for anything philosophical. You hear of anything. If you're curious about who's doing research and philosophy in what in whatever area, you'll find that there are links.

Masimo, is this where you got your. I'm into analytic philosophy teeshirt?

That's right. You know, I love that you look so much smarter when you read that. I know. I'll do a.

More of them can I can I get a piece of the the floor of the room in which Conte wrote his his critique of pure reason, not on steam links, but I'm sure there's somebody out there that might be able to sell it, that that sort of thing, although the Germans are pretty uptight about selling historical paraphernalia so.

Well, I think probably a lot of the molecules in my body right now were also in Incans body. So I don't know why I would spend that much money on. That's right.

You got it. Just by recycling regular recycling here. Right. I probably shouldn't publicize that fact too much, though, or a lot of business on eBay is going to drop.

Not to mention your dating patterns are going to go down because, you know, no one wants to know anything. I can't think of it. Please don't tell my boyfriends that. You know, this has been another episode of rationally speaking.

Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.