Ch. 12

superstition

A commonsense belief that is not plausible, given what is known from scientific research and rational principles. It is frequently associated with rituals and practices for promoting positive outcomes and preventing negative ones. Such beliefs are often thought to be the faulty beliefs of people not in one's own group and not the unsubstantiated beliefs of one's own group.

magical thinking

A kind of thinking that makes supernatural and paranormal assumptions about the workings of the world, especially attributing paranormal powers to oneself or to others (e.g., apparent mental causation).

inductive reasoning

A type of reasoning in which one often argues from a specific case to a general principle, such as a theory or hypothesis; a generalization from bits of evidence.

law of contagion The principle, based on sympathetic magic, that things that come into contact may change each other for a period of time, even after they are no longer in contact.

According to the law of contagion, things that come into contact may change each other for a period of time, even after they are no longer in contact. For instance, a person might not want to handle an item that belonged to an evil individual, fearing that some evil essence may linger in the object and be transferred to the "uncontaminated" person.

B. F. Skinner was the first psychologist to show that superstitious behavior might arise through random reinforcement of the performance of unusual behaviors. He based this claim on research in which pigeons were conditioned through reinforcement to engage in what he argued were superstitious behaviors (Skinner, 1948). When Skinner placed pigeons in operant chambers (cages designed to dispense a food reward when an animal made a desired response) but randomly dispensed food, the pigeons acquired some very unusual and distinctive behaviors. Before the food reinforcer arrived, pigeons engaged in behaviors such as bobbing their heads, poking their heads in one direction, and walking in circles. Whatever behavior the pigeon happened to be performing before the food reward was dispensed tended to get reinforced—eventually leading the pigeon to associate that behavior with the reward, strengthening the response through a kind of learning called operant conditioning. After this operant conditioning, the pigeon would engage in the "ritualistic" behavior unique to its own learning experience, behaving as if it believed the behavior had the power to cause food to be dispensed. Other psychologists have shown that superstitious behaviors can be operantly conditioned in children, using marbles as reinforcers (Wagner & Morris, 1987), and in college students, using points on a counter as reinforcers (Ono, 1987).

According to the law of similarity, things that resemble each other share important properties, captured in the expression "like goes with like." An example is the Haitian ritual in which a practitioner of voodoo burns a doll that looks like the intended victim in an attempt to harm that person.

In an experimental test of belief in apparent mental causation, Emily Pronin and her colleagues instructed participants that they would act as a "witch doctor" in a voodoo-like ceremony, in the context of studying psychosomatic effects, by reading a scientific account of voodoo effects on people (Pronin, Wegner, McCarthy, & Rodriguez, 2006). This study involved both actual participants and a confederate (i.e., a person in cahoots with the experimenter posing as another participant). For one group, the confederate had been instructed to arrive late and behave and dress offensively in the presence of the actual subject, which was expected to induce evil thoughts about the confederate. For a second neutral-thoughts control group, the confederate arrived on time and was well mannered, so that the actual participants would be induced to have neutral thoughts about the confederate. Before the evil-versus-neutral-thoughts manipulation, the actual and confederate participants completed a symptom questionnaire, and the experimenter verified aloud that the confederate participant had reported that he was feeling fine. Then the experimenter separated the actual participant and the confederate (who was to be the victim) and instructed the participant to form vivid and concrete thoughts of the confederate while sticking pins into a voodoo doll. When the confederate, posing as victim, again reported his symptoms, he indicated that he had developed a mild headache, and the experimenter confirmed this symptom out loud. To test effects of the evil-thoughts manipulation, the experimenter asked participants to report whether they felt they had caused the headache in the victim participant and then to rate their levels of guilt, regret, and other emotions. The researchers found that, compared with the neutral-thoughts group, the evil-thoughts group reported significantly higher levels of negative thinking toward the victim and gave significantly higher ratings regarding their belief in having caused the headache. These results suggest that college students can be induced to show apparent mental causation using a superstitious ritual. Consistent with this first demonstration of apparent mental causation, participants in a second study who were instructed to form positive visualizations of a peer's successful basketball shooting performance believed that they had influenced the peer to shoot better.

Because associations based on contagion and other kinds of magical thinking are readily formed and may seem intuitive to people, superstition and magical thinking are likely to be both common and difficult to resist. This notion is supported by research showing that people who believe more in superstitions tend to adopt a more intuitive and less rational thinking style (Lindeman & Aarnio, 2006; Pacini & Epstein, 1999). Like the idea of "tempting fate," magical thinking tends to be more associated with Type 1 thinking. Changing a person's thinking is likely to be a difficult undertaking because the default mode of processing is Type 1 thinking. Another problem is that sometimes people know that a superstition is irrational, yet they do not reject it. We would expect that questioning a superstition and finding it to be irrational (a Type 2 activity) would be sufficient to reject it—but that is not always the case. Although psychologists like Jane Risen (2016) are working to answer the question of why superstitions persist in the face of hard evidence, it remains unresolved. On the negative side, magical thinking, like the law of contagion, is a type of overgeneralization that can lead to biased evaluations of other people and situations. An individual who resists any kind of contact with a person with AIDS is mistakenly treating the development of AIDS as being akin to the usual transfer by infectious agents, rather than recognizing the narrow set of circumstances in which transfer of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can occur. Similarly, treating the clothing of a person perceived to be immoral as "unclean" or repugnant is a type of overgeneralization in which the characteristic of a person is misattributed to an inanimate object. This makes the ethical question of how to deal with superstitious and magical thinking an important social problem.

Should we try to reduce or eliminate superstition and magical thinking? It is clear that these types of beliefs can create a variety of problems, but they sometimes serve adaptive functions, too. What if engaging in superstitious rituals actually improves performance? Damisch, Stroberock, and Mussweiler (2010) conducted a series of experiments in which the task performance of university students engaging in activities said to promote good luck was better than the performance of other students in control groups who were given instructions that omitted the variable of good luck.

Finally, Damisch and colleagues (2010) tested whether expectations about luck could affect sports performance. They found that German students who were told that they were using a lucky golf ball performed better on a golf-putting task than did students in a control group who were not told about the lucky golf ball. The findings suggest that superstition helped participants believe they could succeed and kept them motivated to successfully complete the tasks. However, it should be noted that a recent replication of the Damisch et al. golf study failed to find that participants who were told they had a lucky golf ball putted better than the control group (Calin-Jageman & Caldell, 2014). The results of the Damisch et al. (2010) study, as well as studies reviewed earlier, suggest that the benefits of superstitious behaviors are both motivational and emotional. Recall that engaging in superstitious behaviors may reduce the experience of stress and increase hope (Keinan, 2003). Consistent with this idea, Kay, Whitson, Gaucher, and Galinsky (2009) have proposed that people are threatened by the inherent randomness of the universe, which can arouse great uncertainty. People adopt superstitious behaviors to increase their perception of control over these essentially random events (Kay et al., 2009). For instance, after some horrific event, such as a terrorist attack or a tragic accident, people often comment that they do not understand why the event happened, but they believe that "everything happens for a reason." On one level, this response may represent an effort to maintain control in the face of senseless and unexpected random events—allowing people to go on when confronted by the stress of great uncertainty. Nevertheless, although superstitious behaviors may help us feel better, maintain control, or even perform better, this does not imply that superstitions are true. A "lucky" rabbit's foot does not affect a person's objective chances for success, although the irrational belief that it can help may encourage the person to hope for a positive outcome and reduce the stress associated with an uncertain outcome. This raises the important question of whether we should go to the trouble of resisting superstition and magical thinking, given that these false beliefs are sometimes adaptive, have a biological basis, and may be hard to resist. Yet, even if we have a natural tendency to interpret certain events in superstitious or magical terms, this does not mean that we must inevitably be superstitious or engage in magical thinking.

With the dawn of the Scientific Revolution in the 1600s, science has increasingly been viewed as a way to harness the powers of nature without resorting to supernatural explanations such as witchcraft (Wootton, 2016). In fact, magic and superstition themselves became the subjects of scientific investigation.

In the nineteenth century, scientists identified an important kind of magic, called sympathetic magic, found in many cultures (Frazer, 1996; Tylor, 1974). Two fundamental laws of sympathetic magic are the law of similarity and the law of contagion.

The idea of superstition is very old and has been associated with religion in various ways. The word superstition comes from the Latin word superstitio, meaning to "stand over in amazement," as with religious awe. Some superstitions even have their origins in specific religious traditions. For example, some view the number 13 and the date Friday the 13th as unlucky because 13 people (Jesus and his 12 disciples) attended the "last supper" before the Friday of Jesus's crucifixion. Sometimes, religious believers have viewed the beliefs of other religious groups as superstitious. For instance, the Catholic Church has for many years objected to superstition as adhering to magical and other practices that deny God's divine providence. In the fifteenth century, when the Protestant reformer Martin Luther rejected certain Roman Catholic practices, he said the office of the pope was a source of superstition. Ironically, Luther also believed in witches who had supernatural powers—a belief that is now considered a superstition.

Individuals who believe in magic may assume that certain practices and rituals can harness supernatural forces to achieve seemingly impossible feats, even controlling the forces of nature. People may also view magic as a means to counteract evil forces and the magical powers of witches and others. The belief in witches is quite old. The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament both mention witches, for example. In the late Middle Ages in Europe, fears of their supernatural powers led to the execution of many people, often women, for witchcraft. Using magic, these so-called witches were said to fly through the air and cause harmful events, such as disease, pestilence, and storms. During the Inquisition in Europe, when religious and political institutions collaborated to prosecute and execute people accused of witchcraft, between 60,000 and 600,000 people were sentenced to death by hanging, being burned at the stake, or in some other way for this supposed crime.

A common psychological misconception about inherited traits and genetically based behaviors is that they cannot be modified, as discussed in Chapter 10. Although it is likely to take conscious effort, we do have the capacity to curtail our own unwanted behaviors and to revise our incorrect beliefs. The many examples of people who have succeeded without relying on superstition and magical thinking amply demonstrate our ability to adaptively respond to life's demands without relying on these practices.

Moreover, it seems clear that on some occasions we should resist superstition and magical thinking, especially when someone's life or well-being is threatened. A prime example is the threat posed by the persistent persecution of people as witches in some regions of the world, including parts of Brazil and much of sub-Saharan Africa. From 1991 to 2001, for example, approximately 20,000 individuals in Tanzania were accused of and executed for being witches. Many of the victims were elderly women who showed "red-eye," one of the signs a person is a witch—though this appearance is more likely a symptom of eye irritation produced by the smoke from their cooking fires. In many of these countries, witch doctors and traditional healers use magic, sometimes for a fee, to counteract the magic that witches have supposedly used to harm their victims. In rural Ghana, as many as 3,000 people have been exiled to live in primitive camps with barely enough to eat be cause they were accused of practicing witchcraft. Often a witch doctor decides their fate by merely observing how a dying chicken falls (Figure 12.2): innocent if it falls on its back or guilty if it falls with its beak to the ground (Palmer, 2010).

Believing in a superstition is a sign that a person is not thinking critically. Superstitions, like other false beliefs, can result from poor reasoning. Conversely, reasoning from a false belief, such as a superstition, can lead to a faulty judgment or conclusion. In contrast, critical thinking (CT) involves making judgments and forming beliefs that are supported by good reasons (Lipman, 1991) while discarding unsupported, irrational, false beliefs. Superstitions also resemble paranormal beliefs in that they often assume that people have supernatural and magical powers. For instance, the superstition that witches can cause misfortune simply by thinking a malevolent thought is a supernatural claim involving magical thinking. Superstitious people are often obliged to engage in repetitive behaviors and rituals to increase their chances of success or reduce the risk of negative outcomes; however, these actions have no rational basis in changing objective probabilities in the world. In addition, superstitions resemble psychological misconceptions in that both are false commonsense beliefs; but unlike misconceptions, superstitions often make claims that sound unrelated to specific behaviors and mental processes. For example, the superstitious belief that a lucky charm will improve performance is nonspecific about how the mind works, whereas the psychological misconception that venting anger reduces aggression makes a specific psychological (albeit false) claim. Likewise, the misconception that hypnosis is a unique state of consciousness, in which people can be compelled to do things they would not ordinarily do, makes a specific psychological claim, although the claim has not been supported by psychological research. In contrast to superstitions lacking connection to psychological theory and research, some psychological misconceptions are actually derived from incorrect interpretations of ideas that have been researched by psychologists. For instance, although studies on hemispheric differences have shown that the left hemisphere is dominant for language processing and the right hemisphere is dominant during spatial and nonverbal tasks, it is a psychological misconception (and a sweeping generalization) to claim that some people are left-brained and others are right-brained (Lilienfeld, Lynn, Ruscio, & Beyerstein, 2010). Moreover, the notion that people repress memories of traumatic events—a specific claim originated by Sigmund Freud and favored by some psychologists today—is a psychological misconception because research has not supported the claim. Thus, unlike misconceptions, superstitions have virtually nothing specific to say about brain function, memory, and other psychological processes.

People often use the term superstition to refer to beliefs that are incorrect or recognized as untrue from the perspective of some belief system they presume is true. From a scientific perspective, a superstition is a commonsense belief that is not plausible, given what we know from scientific research and rational principles. Superstitions are like pseudoscientific beliefs in this regard; but unlike pseudoscience, people do not claim that superstitious ideas are scientific. For example, many individuals—even U.S. presidents—behave as if they accept the superstition that the number 13 is unlucky, but they do not claim that this belief has a scientific basis. However, many proponents of the pseudoscience Scientology would maintain that Scientology is scientific, even though its tenets are not empirically supported.

SUMMARY

Superstition is a commonsense belief that is not plausible, given what we know from scientific research, but unlike pseudoscience no claims are made that superstitious ideas are scientific. Also unlike psychological misconceptions that make specific claims about behavior and mental processes, superstitions make no such specific psychological claims. Superstitious beliefs, which are associated with magical thinking, sometimes imply that people have paranormal and supernatural powers. Two fundamental laws of sympathetic magic are the law of similarity and the law of contagion. According to the law of similarity, things that resemble each other share important properties, and control can be exerted by way of this similarity. According to the law of contagion, things that come into contact may change each other for a period of time even after they are no longer in contact. Research has shown that many people are susceptible to superstition and magical thinking, particularly people in high-risk situations. They underestimate the role of coincidence, especially coincidences that happen to them, and tend to find patterns in random data. These factors may contribute to their finding patterns in behaviors and outcomes that they attribute to luck but which are actually coincidental. Studies on operant conditioning have shown that pigeons and people can both acquire superstitious behaviors through this learning procedure, wherein behaviors are associated with randomly occurring rewards. Engaging in superstitious behaviors may help people manage stress and tension associated with Other research shows that people who endorse paranormal and superstitious beliefs tend to rely more on an intuitive thinking style (Type 1 thinking). The law of contagion may help explain why people want contact with objects associated with celebrities and avoid contact with objects associated with criminals and sick people. The law of contagion may have evolved through natural selection, as it increases the survival rate for individuals who avoid people who are ill. Superstitious behavior and magical thinking are associated with thinking errors as well. Besides operant conditioning, people can come to believe that objects are lucky by means of "after this, therefore because of this" reasoning, as when they irrationally perceive the presence of some unrelated object to have increased their chances of success. The law of similarity is related to the inappropriate use of the representativeness heuristic. Research has shown that college students may commit the thinking error of apparent mental causation, wherein they believe their thoughts can directly affect other people or events without any intermediate physical mechanism. Finally, belief in tempting fate or pushing one's luck is a type of magical thinking error in which a person mistakenly believes that engaging in or not engaging in some action will lead to a negative outcome when there is no objective relation between the action and the outcome's probability. What we decide to do about superstitions and magical thinking depends on our analysis of their costs and benefits. Although superstitious behaviors are irrational, they may actually help people reduce stress, improve performance, and do little harm in many cases. The law of contagion has probably kept many people alive over the years, by prompting the implementation of quarantines for persons with communicable diseases. Unfortunately, they can also lead to unnecessary avoidance of and discrimination against individuals, as in the case of people accused of witchcraft and the avoidance of people with AIDS. If engaging in superstitious rituals or magical thinking causes distress, prevents people from getting evidence-based treatment, or leads to the harming of others, then intervention is needed.

The law of contagion can account for how objects take on special, even magical, powers through their positive association with people, objects, and events. Many of us have keepsakes or memorabilia—that is, objects that have special meaning for us because of the associations they evoke. More often, the law of contagion is expressed as the desire to avoid contact with—and contamination from—an object that is negatively associated with someone or something viewed as harmful or damaged. People may avoid contact with the object even though there is no rational or scientific reason for the reaction beyond the psychological association with the thing or object. For instance, Rozin and Nemeroff (1990) found that participants who were asked if they would wear a sweater worn by someone who had lost a limb or worn by someone else who was a convicted killer were reluctant to do so. Contagion effects have been found with several contaminating agents. For example, despite the fact that it is known that acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is not transmitted without the exchange of bodily fluids, people will avoid contact with clothing worn just once by an AIDS patient and then washed (Rozin, Markwith, & MacCauley, 1994).

Superstitious behavior and magical thinking are found in many developing countries, but we can easily observe them in athletes and college students in developed countries as well. For instance, the Hall of Fame baseball player Wade Boggs ate chicken before every game for 20 years. As part of his 5-hour, ritualized pregame preparation, he would finish a drill by stepping on third base, then second base, then first base, and would finally take two steps toward the coaching box and exactly four steps toward the dugout. Furthermore, when he first stepped into the batter's box, he would draw in the dirt the Hebrew word chai with the tip of his bat (Vyse, 2014). In a telling remark, Boggs reported that he made these elaborate preparations so as not to leave anything to chance. This example illustrates how superstitious behavior is used to prepare a person for a high-stakes, risky activity. It is not surprising that athletes, fighter pilots, gamblers, and others who are confronted with risky choices tend to engage in superstitious behavior. John McCain probably acquired some of his superstitious habits when he was a fighter pilot (Wargo, 2008). Those individuals who engage in superstitious rituals often incorrectly believe they are increasing their chances of success by affecting some forces in the world related to luck. Of course, engaging in some superstitious ritual, such as drawing a symbol in the dirt with your bat, does nothing to objectively change the probability of success. So why do people perform these acts anyway? Perhaps their tendency to make errors in estimating the likelihood of events leads superstitious people to misinterpret the effects of their actions on outcomes. For instance, what is the probability that any two people in a group of 30 share the same birthday? People often estimate this event as having a low probability, but it is actually more than .70. Individuals often underestimate the probabilities of coincidences, in general, and tend to consider a coincidence in their own lives as much more meaningful than when the same coincidence happens to someone else (Falk, 1989). Moreover, they may be especially likely to attribute a correct prediction to precognition rather than just to coincidence (Blackmore, 1992b). Likewise, failure to take coincidence into account might help explain how people come to believe that some random activity they have engaged in has led to a favorable outcome, rather than interpreting the result as a chance occurrence. Engaging in superstitious rituals may also help people manage the stress and tension associated with unpredictable outcomes, especially when the stakes are high. In simulations of athletic competitions, athletes who reported higher levels of superstition also reported that athletics was more important to them and that their pregame tension was greater. Psychological tension was also greater when a game was more important and its outcome more uncertain (Brevers, Dan, Noel, & Nils, 2011). In other cases, such as gambling, in which stress reduction is not likely to affect the outcome, the illusion of control that a gambler experiences by engaging in the ritual may reduce his or her stress level. Superstitious behavior may have a motivational effect, by increasing the hope for a positive outcome (Keinan, 2003). Experiencing a reduction of stress might bring a similar reward, thereby reinforcing the use of a superstitious ritual even when it has had no other effect on an outcome. More generally, superstitious rituals may offer compensatory control over the anxiety-provoking randomness of life by helping people believe that random, unconnected behaviors can exert causal control. Sometimes, superstitious behavior involves treating an object as if it is imbued with a special power or the ability to bring good luck. Usually, such "lucky" objects are used to improve the chances of success in some important contest or challenge that poses significant risk of failure. For instance, approximately one-third of college students have lucky pens or special clothing they wear whenever they take a test (Albas & Albas, 1989). A famous example from the basketball world is Hall-of-Famer Michael Jordan, who, throughout his long NBA career with the Chicago Bulls, continued to wear his University of North Carolina shorts under his regular Bulls uniform because he believed they brought him good luck (Wargo, 2008). Such superstitious practices can be partly explained as the individuals learning (falsely) through operant conditioning that the ritual use of an object predicts success, but these practices also seem to involve thinking errors. In the cases just mentioned, the person seems to have fallen prey to post hoc, ergo propter hoc thinking—translated as "after this, therefore because of this" (introduced in Chapter 2). For example, a student might mistakenly conclude that after acing an exam using a particular blue pen, it was the pen that produced the positive outcome. This kind of thinking error may prove dangerous if the student assumes that the next time he or she brings the lucky pen, it will somehow affect what the student needs to know for the exam. A much better strategy to prepare for the exam would be to go through the textbook and class notes to identify the important information to study. The law of similarity can operate through the use of the representativeness heuristic, too (see Chapter 11). The voodoo practice of sticking pins into a doll to harm the person it represents demonstrates the thinking that "like goes with like." Although movies and popular culture have associated harming someone with the voodoo practice of harming an effigy of that individual, this inappropriate use of the representativeness heuristic dates back to the magical practices of "the cunning folk," who were practitioners of white magic in Britain during the late Medieval period (Hutton, 1999). White magic was used for benevolent purposes to promote health and counteract malevolent witchcraft that sometimes involved sticking pins in the image of a malevolent witch. The law of contagion can account for how objects take on special, even magical, powers through their positive association with people, objects, and events. Many of us have keepsakes or memorabilia—that is, objects that have special meaning for us because of the associations they evoke. Sometimes these associations can take a strange turn. Recently, a decayed molar from Beatle John Lennon (shown in Figure 12.1), extracted by his dentist in the 1960s, was auctioned off for $3,200! Although a Canadian dentist with an interest in celebrity teeth made the purchase, it was really just a rotten molar extracted in the 1960s. Its value was purely the result of its positive association with Lennon's celebrity status. Similarly, when psychologist Bruce Hood asked people at one of his lectures if they wanted to hold a pen owned by the great scientist Albert Einstein, they were eager to do so (Hood, 2009).

Such superstitious practices can be partly explained as the individuals learning (falsely) through operant conditioning that the ritual use of an object predicts success, but these practices also seem to involve thinking errors. In the cases just mentioned, the person seems to have fallen prey to post hoc, ergo propter hoc thinking—translated as "after this, therefore because of this" (introduced in Chapter 2). For example, a student might mistakenly conclude that after acing an exam using a particular blue pen, it was the pen that produced the positive outcome. This kind of thinking error may prove dangerous if the student assumes that the next time he or she brings the lucky pen, it will somehow affect what the student needs to know for the exam. A much better strategy to prepare for the exam would be to go through the textbook and class notes to identify the important information to study.

The law of similarity can operate through the use of the representativeness heuristic, too (see Chapter 11). The voodoo practice of sticking pins into a doll to harm the person it represents demonstrates the thinking that "like goes with like." Although movies and popular culture have associated harming someone with the voodoo practice of harming an effigy of that individual, this inappropriate use of the representativeness heuristic dates back to the magical practices of "the cunning folk," who were practitioners of white magic in Britain during the late Medieval period (Hutton, 1999). White magic was used for benevolent purposes to promote health and counteract malevolent witchcraft that sometimes involved sticking pins in the image of a malevolent witch.

Other examples of the need to resist dangerous superstitions and magical thinking are found in Western and developed countries. For instance, the mistaken belief that AIDS is transmissible by ordinary and nonsexual contact with an infected person may lead to needless avoidance, and even ostracism, of people with AIDS.

Unfortunately, sick people who believe they are bewitched tend to trust traditional healers to cure them more than they trust professionals who use evidence-based medical practices (Ivey & Myers, 2008). A study of witchcraft belief in Ghana revealed another dangerous misconception: Men who tended to believe that AIDS could be acquired through witchcraft also tended not to have used a condom the last time they had sexual intercourse (Tenkorang, Gyimah, Maticka-Tyndale, & Adjel, 2011). Perhaps better science education could help people understand the irrationality of such beliefs. Yet education is unlikely to eradicate superstitious belief in witchcraft in such regions because, in part, people seem capable of maintaining both scientific and superstitious beliefs at the same time (Ivey & Myers, 2008). A study of the health practices and beliefs about witchcraft in rural Tanzania found that many people believe that AIDS can result from witchcraft. Some people with AIDS went to traditional healers as well as medical practitioners for help, but stopped going to the medical facilities because they did not believe they could be cured there. Traditional healers sometimes claim to be able to cure AIDS with witchcraft, even though no real cure for AIDS exists as yet. Foregoing evidence-based treatments, such as antiretroviral medicines that can prolong the life of a person with AIDS, in favor of ineffective, superstitious, and traditional remedies is likely to have deadly consequences. DEALING WITH SUPERSTITION AND MAGICAL THINKING Should we try to reduce or eliminate superstition and magical thinking? It is clear that these types of beliefs can create a variety of problems, but they sometimes serve adaptive functions, too. What if engaging in superstitious rituals actually improves performance? Damisch, Stroberock, and Mussweiler (2010) conducted a series of experiments in which the task performance of university students engaging in activities said to promote good luck was better than the performance of other students in control groups who were given instructions that omitted the variable of good luck. For example, in one experiment, the task was remembering pairs of cards in a memory game. One group did so in the presence of a lucky charm they had brought to the experiment; another randomly assigned group did the memory task without their lucky charm (because the experimenter had earlier removed the charm and placed it in another room). Participants also completed a measure of self-efficacy in which they rated how confident they were that they would master the memory game. Participants who had their lucky charm performed significantly better on the memory task and had higher self-efficacy than the group without their lucky charm. The researchers replicated this effect by showing that participants who had their lucky charm were more confident that they would succeed in solving an anagram puzzle (rearranging scrambled letters to make words) and, in turn, performed better on the task than the participants who did not have their lucky charm. Damisch and colleagues (2010) showed that one reason the group members who had their lucky charm performed better was that they were willing to persist longer on the task. Finally, Damisch and colleagues (2010) tested whether expectations about luck could affect sports performance. They found that German students who were told that they were using a lucky golf ball performed better on a golf-putting task than did students in a control group who were not told about the lucky golf ball. The findings suggest that superstition helped participants believe they could succeed and kept them motivated to successfully complete the tasks. However, it should be noted that a recent replication of the Damisch et al. golf study failed to find that participants who were told they had a lucky golf ball putted better than the control group (Calin-Jageman & Caldell, 2014). The results of the Damisch et al. (2010) study, as well as studies reviewed earlier, suggest that the benefits of superstitious behaviors are both motivational and emotional. Recall that engaging in superstitious behaviors may reduce the experience of stress and increase hope (Keinan, 2003). Consistent with this idea, Kay, Whitson, Gaucher, and Galinsky (2009) have proposed that people are threatened by the inherent randomness of the universe, which can arouse great uncertainty. People adopt superstitious behaviors to increase their perception of control over these essentially random events (Kay et al., 2009). For instance, after some horrific event, such as a terrorist attack or a tragic accident, people often comment that they do not understand why the event happened, but they believe that "everything happens for a reason." On one level, this response may represent an effort to maintain control in the face of senseless and unexpected random events—allowing people to go on when confronted by the stress of great uncertainty. Nevertheless, although superstitious behaviors may help us feel better, maintain control, or even perform better, this does not imply that superstitions are true. A "lucky" rabbit's foot does not affect a person's objective chances for success, although the irrational belief that it can help may encourage the person to hope for a positive outcome and reduce the stress associated with an uncertain outcome. This raises the important question of whether we should go to the trouble of resisting superstition and magical thinking, given that these false beliefs are sometimes adaptive, have a biological basis, and may be hard to resist. Yet, even if we have a natural tendency to interpret certain events in superstitious or magical terms, this does not mean that we must inevitably be superstitious or engage in magical thinking. A common psychological misconception about inherited traits and genetically based behaviors is that they cannot be modified, as discussed in Chapter 10. Although it is likely to take conscious effort, we do have the capacity to curtail our own unwanted behaviors and to revise our incorrect beliefs. The many examples of people who have succeeded without relying on superstition and magical thinking amply demonstrate our ability to adaptively respond to life's demands without relying on these practices. Moreover, it seems clear that on some occasions we should resist superstition and magical thinking, especially when someone's life or well-being is threatened. A prime example is the threat posed by the persistent persecution of people as witches in some regions of the world, including parts of Brazil and much of sub-Saharan Africa. From 1991 to 2001, for example, approximately 20,000 individuals in Tanzania were accused of and executed for being witches. Many of the victims were elderly women who showed "red-eye," one of the signs a person is a witch—though this appearance is more likely a symptom of eye irritation produced by the smoke from their cooking fires. In many of these countries, witch doctors and traditional healers use magic, sometimes for a fee, to counteract the magic that witches have supposedly used to harm their victims. In rural Ghana, as many as 3,000 people have been exiled to live in primitive camps with barely enough to eat because they were accused of practicing witchcraft. Often a witch doctor decides their fate by merely observing how a dying chicken falls (Figure 12.2): innocent if it falls on its back or guilty if it falls with its beak to the ground (Palmer, 2010). FIGURE 12.2 A chicken being sacrificed in West Africa, as part of a ritual to determine the fate of someone accused of witchcraft. Unfortunately, sick people who believe they are bewitched tend to trust traditional healers to cure them more than they trust professionals who use evidence-based medical practices (Ivey & Myers, 2008). A study of witchcraft belief in Ghana revealed another dangerous misconception: Men who tended to believe that AIDS could be acquired through witchcraft also tended not to have used a condom the last time they had sexual intercourse (Tenkorang, Gyimah, Maticka-Tyndale, & Adjel, 2011). Perhaps better science education could help people understand the irrationality of such beliefs. Yet education is unlikely to eradicate superstitious belief in witchcraft in such regions because, in part, people seem capable of maintaining both scientific and superstitious beliefs at the same time (Ivey & Myers, 2008). A study of the health practices and beliefs about witchcraft in rural Tanzania found that many people believe that AIDS can result from witchcraft. Some people with AIDS went to traditional healers as well as medical practitioners for help, but stopped going to the medical facilities because they did not believe they could be cured there. Traditional healers sometimes claim to be able to cure AIDS with witchcraft, even though no real cure for AIDS exists as yet. Foregoing evidence-based treatments, such as antiretroviral medicines that can prolong the life of a person with AIDS, in favor of ineffective, superstitious, and traditional remedies is likely to have deadly consequences. Other examples of the need to resist dangerous superstitions and magical thinking are found in Western and developed countries. For instance, the mistaken belief that AIDS is transmissible by ordinary and nonsexual contact with an infected person may lead to needless avoidance, and even ostracism, of people with AIDS. Finally, although belief in superstition is not usually associated with psychopathology and other mental problems (Vyse, 2014), some research suggests that people with obsessive-compulsive disorder may be more prone to engage in magical and superstitious thinking than people without the disorder (Einstein, Menzies, St. Clare, Drobny, & Helgadottir, 2011; Sica, Novara, & Sanavio, 2002). Feeling compelled to practice some superstitious ritual or engage in magical thinking that causes problems indicates the need for help in using a more adaptive, evidence-based therapy for coping with stressful events.

People's reluctance to tempt fate is another kind of superstitious thinking that involves difficulty with judging the probability of events. Many individuals behave as if they should not do anything to tempt fate so as to reduce their chance of a negative outcome. To examine this issue, Risen and Gilovich (2007) asked participants to read a scenario in which a young man named Jon, applying to Stanford, was sent a Stanford T-shirt by his optimistic mother. One group read a version of the scenario in which Jon stuffed the shirt in his drawer and did not wear it until he heard about Stanford's decision, so as not to tempt fate. A second group read a different version in which Jon began wearing the T-shirt the next day. All the participants then rated how likely it was that Stanford would accept Jon for admittance. The group who read the scenario in which Jon tempted fate by wearing the T-shirt immediately rated him as significantly less likely to be accepted, despite the fact that whether he wore the T-shirt would have no objective effect on his chances of acceptance. In later experiments, Risen and Gilovich (2007) showed that negative outcomes were made more accessible after actions that tempted fate. In other words, actions that tempted fate brought negative outcomes more readily to mind than actions that did not. This influence of the availability heuristic tended to increase participants' judgments that a negative outcome would occur. In the context of superstitious thinking, this study provided another example of how Type 1 thinking is associated with acceptance of commonsense, unsubstantiated claims. Superstition and magical thinking share the paranormal assumption that mental events can directly affect physical ones—that is, that simply having a thought can change an outcome or alter physical reality in some way. This idea might seem intuitively appealing. After all, we know we can affect physical reality by first having a thought or intention and then acting on that thought in the "external" world. We know, too, that stressful thoughts can affect our own physical well-being. It is another thing entirely, however, to make the claim that merely having a thought, without the intervention of some behavior or physical factor, could affect another person or cause an event. This kind of thinking error, which is grounded in a paranormal claim, is called apparent mental causation.

apparent mental causation A type of thinking error in which a person believes that merely having a thought can affect objective reality, akin to the paranormal ability of telekinesis.

The text has listed the following as having no scientific evidence based practices:

magic witchcraft "lucky" rabbit's foot

The text talked about the following principle underlying _____________ is that minimizing contact with a sick individual can reduce the risk of spreading disease.

quarantines