Superstition

In our modern, enlightened society, most people claim not to be superstitious. Though, According to a Gallup poll, almost 50 percent of Americans are superstitious, believing that certain rituals, like wearing unmatched socks will influence the likelihood of an event like pitching a no-hitter. A superstition is a belief or behavior that’s inconsistent with conventional science and attributes functional mental properties into non-mental phenomenon. Essentially, a superstition is a belief that the universe is always watching you and changes depending on your actions or what you’re holding. At their core, superstitions are self-fulfilling prophesies. You plant an idea in your head, allow yourself to believe in magic and then believe doing something in a particular way or wearing a trinket will help you perform better. This seems insane, but it’s a common phenomenon. We have different theories as to why we believe in superstitions, even though most people know they’re entirely made-up.

     Many superstitions originated at a time when little was known about how the physical world functions. They were an early attempt at making sense of the world through legends and anecdotal tales of cause and effect. Superstitious beliefs may also be seen as more accessible than scientific facts. To be confirmed, scientific facts must be objective, verified observations. They must stand up to investigation with consistent results. Superstitions, on the other hand, defy logic and simply require belief. People can “just know” they are “true” instead of being bothered with proving them to others.



     Superstitious people often say, “I don’t know how it works, it just does.” When it comes to performance, maybe superstitions do work–in a way. A basketball player might score more points when wearing his lucky socks, but give those same socks to a kid off the street who doesn’t have the baller’s skills or dedicated training regime, and he’d still be riding the bench.
     Eric Hamerman, assistant professor of consumer behavior and marketing at Tulane University sought to better understand how control breaks down in a recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Through a handful of experiments involving lucky pens, lucky and unlucky avatars, and science quizzes, they pinpointed key differences between how people approach luck depending on the goal. Both chronic and temporary performance goals employed some form of superstition. Learning goals never did. Even when achieving the goal was uncertain — “What if I choke on my slide whistle mid-solo?” — superstition only cropped up to help people cope with performance goals.
This raises the intriguing possibility that any belief, whether true or not, which increases our confidence might have the same power to get us what we want when the outcome depends on our own performance. Prayer in any religion, then, might be effective not because it actually invokes a supreme being or even a mystic law, but because it invokes our belief in those things, invokes a sense that we have an “ace in the hole,” which then provides us the confidence to perform better, to keep trying and to remain optimistic.



      Superstition should be seen as little more than emotional comfort. The pangs of worry we feel during the moments before an expected applause or getting a test back reminds us that we can’t choose how we’re judged. The best we can do is stay true to the parental wisdom of knowing we did our best. Superstition is what gives us hope before the hammer falls.