Speaking of Psychology - The psychology of superstition, with Stuart Vyse, PhD

Episode Date: August 11, 2021

Just in time for Friday the 13th, we discuss the psychology of superstition with Stuart Vyse, PhD, author of the book “Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition.” Vyse discusses the origins of some popular superstitions, the psychological purposes superstition serves, and whether or not it’s possible that your lucky charm or pre-game ritual might actually help you perform better. Listener Survey - https://www.apa.org/podcastsurvey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you ever knock on wood for good luck? Cross the street if you see a black cat? What about refusing to stay on the 13th floor of a hotel, if the hotel even has a 13th floor? Do you go out of your way to avoid walking under ladders? Even if you don't do these things, you're probably at least familiar with them and other common superstitions. Or maybe you have some personal superstitions,

a lucky number, a charm, a ritual that you find indispensable. Superstitious beliefs and behaviors like these are common. But where do superstition come from? What psychological purpose does it serve? And are some types of people more likely than others to be superstitious? What's the connection between superstition and other forms of irrational thinking? And is it possible that your lucky charm or pre-game ritual might actually help you perform better? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association,

that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. Our guest today is Dr. Stuart Weiss, author of the books Believing in Magic, The Psychology of Superstition, and Superstition, a very short introduction. Dr. Weiss is a behavioral scientist, teacher, and writer who is often called upon by the media to explain humans' propensity for irrational thinking, including superstition. He was for many years a professor of psychology and chair of the psychology department at Connecticut College. He's now a full-time writer and speaker. He is also a contributing editor at Skeptical Inquirer magazine, where he writes the behavior and belief column. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Weiss.

I'm happy to be here. So as I just said, there are maybe two types of superstitions, the widely shared cultural ones like Black Cats in the number 13, and then personal ones like Lucky Charms and rituals. What unites those two areas and makes something a superstition? How do you define that concept? Well, first of all, let me start by defining. it. I define it fairly broadly in which I say that a superstition is a belief or practice that is inconsistent with our understanding of science. And then I limit it to things that are in some sense

pragmatic, either trying to bring on good luck or avoid bad luck. And in terms of the two kinds of superstition that you mention, which is, that's a good way to think about it. And I, I, uh, I do separate out what we would call personal superstitions that are unique to yourself and acquired sort of usually by trial and error from superstitions that are taught to us that we absorb simply by being in the culture and we learn about black cats and ladders and the number 13. And what they have in common, of course, is the need to control, an attempt to to bring about the good thing or avoid the bad thing.

And as a result, they tend to emerge in circumstances when we have less than perfect control. Two of the kind of conditions that mean that we are going to or more likely to be superstitious are ones where we don't have control and yet we do care very much about what happens about the outcome. So you're a psychologist, but you've also become an expert in the history and the sociology of superstition. How far back in history do we have evidence of superstition?

From the beginning, I mean, from the beginning of history. I mean, the problem, of course, is that what we call superstition is based in our dominant belief system, which is Western science. You know, we are all post-enlightenment people who have adopted science and reasons. as our standards. But looking backwards, humans have always wanted to have control over things that they couldn't control and to know what was coming up in the future. And so many things that the ancient people did in Greece or earlier would look like superstition

to us. And so the desire and the practices have been there all along. The most important thing about the history of superstition, it's the history of a word. It is a label that has been applied to many kinds of beliefs and practices. And in general, most of history, that word has been applied to the unorthodox or the unsupported beliefs of the time. So in the Roman era, Christians emerged, and their beliefs and their practices were called superstitious because they were not the standard authorized beliefs of the time. When the Roman Empire changed to being a Christian empire, suddenly the old Roman gods and beliefs were thought to be superstitious.

So, you know, what goes around comes around. But we now, of course, in the modern age, we hopefully have. have passed through the scientific age, and now we adopt science and reason as our standards. And so when we call something superstitious, it's because it doesn't meet that criteria. And it doesn't fit with that worldview. We may end up airing this podcast on Friday the 13th. We're certainly talking about that. I'm just wondering if you can explain the history of that particular superstition.

You know, what's unlucky about Friday the 13th? There are several theories. There are at least three dominant theories of where Friday the 13th came from. I'm going to give you first the one that I believe is the strongest. And there's a fellow who wrote a book on the topic who convinced me that this was the most common origin of the superstition. But anyway, it comes from originally the idea of 13 camps from The Last Supper and 13 people at a table. And of course, you know, Jesus was betrayed. and so 13 people at a table was thought to be an unlucky thing or groups of 13 people.

And that became, was a superstition for quite a while. And then at some point really fairly late in the 19th century, 13 got sort of freed from the table and got to be unlucky in and of itself in any context. And then it sort of adhered to Friday because Friday was already an unlucky day. Friday was Hangman's Day. It was a day that people got hung in much of Europe. And so it comes around every once in a while, once or twice a year, there's a Friday the 13th. And so people noted there also was a book and a movie. The movie is now lost to history, but there was an early book and movie that also helped to solidify the Friday the 13th.

superstition. It seems that there are a lot of superstitions around lucky and unlucky numbers. Some of those are cultural superstitions like the number 13 or eight and four in Chinese culture. And then there are the personal superstitions that people have around their own lucky numbers. Like if you play the lottery every week, you have to play the same numbers. Do you have any thoughts on why numbers are such fertile ground for superstition? Well, it's a good question. I think it's because there are a couple of reasons. One is because they are sort of arbitrary to begin with. And so it's easy to sort of stick something onto them.

There's no interfering association. And so if you just find that five is your lucky number, then there's not going to be any competing idea with that. And numbers do come up. I mean, you can't avoid them. They do come up from time to time. And because they're arbitrary, we try to sort of make, some meaning out of them. And so I think that's a common thing. You mentioned the eight

and four. This is another way in which, and this is in Chinese culture, where again, a completely random association with an arbitrary number is what causes those superstitions. So the number eight is associated with the sound for prosperity or something in the Chinese language, the symbol is, and the number four is associated with death, you know, the name death. So that random association, which has nothing to do with, it's just the sound of the word, is enough to make those two numbers special in Chinese culture. And you'll find that many, many Chinese phone numbers have eights in them, in very few fours. And the pricing of products in the marketplace,

avoids the number four quite often. So it doesn't come up. And so if you happen to have an apartment for sale on the fourth floor of a building, your chances of selling it to a Chinese person might be diminished. That's right. That's right.

You might have to offer a better deal than that. You know, in case of the number 13, I discovered that, you know, most hotels, don't have a 13th floor. You sort of made reference to that in your introduction. And of course, they do, but they just don't number it 13. There was a study done that showed that approximately 80% of the buildings in New York City that could have a 13th floor don't. And I think that's a straight economic decision, a business decision, that it makes it easier to rent the hotel rooms or

office space on the 14th floor than on the 13th floor. But the interesting thing, I found, if I can go on just a little bit more about this, is that in Russia, they take a different approach. In Moscow, rather than eliminating the 13th floor, which they sort of scoff at, they offer a discount for apartments on the 13th floor, that you get a slightly better price. I mean, I don't know what happens when you turn around and need to sell that space again, but, you know, that's the approach they take. How common are superstitious beliefs and behavior in the U.S.? Have you seen any survey data that talks about how many people consider themselves superstitious

or some variation of that term? There have been a few studies, surveys over the years. Gallup used to do one every once in a while, but they have sort of tapered off on that. In terms of the individual superstitions, the numbers tend to be fairly low, somewhere between, like black cats or ladders or something like this of the cultural superstitions. The numbers are between 10 and 20 percent of people would say that they believe in those. But if you just say overall, are you superstitious or not, the surveys tend to be higher than there are about 50 percent of people in the last survey I saw, which is fairly old, of Americans,

said that they were at least a little superstitious. So I think it's still quite widespread and maybe even increasing, I don't know. Well, and I know I'm not being original here by asking you this question, but are some cultures more superstitious than others? And if so, why do you think that might be? I used to say no to that question, but the more I study the Chinese culture, the more I think that it is very superstitious. They have, I mean, we've already talked about the number superstitions, but they also have superstitions about. the color red, for example, being lucky. And so wedding dresses are frequently red in color.

And you notice the Chinese restaurants often have red as a dominant color. So there are just a lot of things in the Chinese culture that are luck-oriented. And products are often designed with that in mind. They avoid, you know, red products do well in many cases when they're sold. So this is, it's interesting, but the business world and marketers have taken note of all these things. And there are, for example, American hotels make special, or at least are advised to take special note of things that might affect Asian travelers as being lucky or unlucky. But many cultures are, just to skip back to your question, many cultures are superstitious. It's not just the Chinese, you know, there are Irish superstitions, there are British superstitions.

It's everywhere. And there's nobody who can hold their head up and say that we're completely immune. Well, my mother's family came from Italy, and I grew up with a lot of Italian-American friends. And we had some beliefs that I think were particular to that background. For example, my great-a-a-aunt would say, you never put a hat on the bed because it's bad luck. Someone's going to die. And my grandparents would say that my mother was overlooked. That was the term that they used, that she was overlooked as a baby, which they meant someone gave her the evil eye. Although in her case, they said it was a good thing.

It's why she was smart. But could you talk about the origins of the belief in the evil eye and the things that people do to ward it off? Yeah. Well, as far as the origins, it is very old. And I don't know exactly where it started. I believe it's mentioned in the Bible, but it's even older than that. But the thing that's the most interesting about the evil eye is that it is very widespread. I mean, Italy, of course, is very much a part of the evil eye culture.

Malocchio. Malocchio, that's right. So the evil eye is very widespread, but it is different for different cultures. And the way it's dealt with in different cultures is quite interesting. So it's very popular in South Asia. Indians, Bangladeshis, and others believe in it. And it's also very popular in the Middle East and Italy, I think less so in Western Europe and also in South America. I grew up in the Midwest as a sort of default Protestant.

I'd never heard of it before. And it wasn't until I was teaching superstition that a student from Persexuals, Peru first told me about it, and then I began to hear much more. And so the interesting thing for me is the fact that, you know, throughout the world, there are different sort of countermeasures that you use to avoid the malocchio or the evil eye, depending upon where you are. And there's a whole jewelry industry that has cropped up to help people distract the evil eye away. In Italy, for example, there's a horn-shaped object that you buy and wear, and it's supposed to distract someone's evil eye away from you.

And in the Middle East, they have the Homsah, which is a hand-shaped jewelry, which is very popular. It usually has an eye in the middle of it. Turks have these blue-and-white Nazars. They're very beautiful. It's often made of glass that look like a bull's-eye, and they're supposed to also distract the evil eye. So the way in which it's dealt with in each country,

the basic idea is still the same, right? Usually it's that you have something that you really value, and the idea is that the person with the evil eye is envious of you and can somehow harm it. But babies are a common thing that people are worried about, that someone's going to harm the baby. And so the idea is, is that if we can just distract the evil eye, or in the case of some of these jewelry items,

actually reflect the evil eye back at the perpetrator, that will be protected. And so it's interesting. Also, in Italy, in particular, not to go on too long about this, but I love this topic. If you're ill, there's apparently, and I don't know if you've heard of this one, But there is a diagnostic procedure involving getting a small bowl of water and dropping olive oil on top. And if a person is sick, if the olive oil appears as just drops floating on the water, then the illness was not caused by the evil eye. But if the oil looks runny on the top of the water, at least as I've heard it, then that means your illness was caused by the evil eye.

I'm not sure what that means as far as how to treat it, but that's apparently an old technique, which is, I think, completely Italian. There's no, there's no, you know, the olive oil part of it would make that so. But getting back to the psychology of superstition, what are the psychological processes that are going on when people develop superstitions and make these behaviors part of their lives?

Is there some psychological purpose? I think you talked about control as one of them. Yes, yes. It's very much the case for all of them. There are very few instances where if you have complete control and you know what's going to happen, then that you employ a superstition. It's very rare, even if the outcome is very important,

it's only in those circumstances where you can't be certain of the outcome that a superstition comes about. So control is very big. In the case of personal superstitions, the process is a sort of trial and error thing. There's a famous experiment that was done by B.F. Skinner with pigeons in which he put the pigeons in a chamber and they were hungry. And he gave them food for a brief period every 15 seconds, and they didn't have to do anything. They could just sit there if they wanted and wait for the food to come back and eat it and then wait again until it came back again. but they didn't just sit there.

What they did is they moved around and it was as if they established rituals and each bird had a different ritual, but they established rituals as if they thought that that ritual was what brought the food, you know, and Skinner's interpretation of that was that it was an accidental relationship

between the two and so on. So now that study actually has been, you know, batted around with some controversy over the years, but it's a nice metaphor for what we do as well, is that if you wear a new tie and you go and do a really great performance at a talk or a presentation, you might just wear that tie each time you have to do that present, a presentation, because it feels like it has some special quality. And that's all it takes for many people. you probably have to be open to the idea of a superstition in general before you would do that. But often they are those sort of random associations.

And I think what sustains it in the long run is that, of course, it's not that it's magic. I don't want to burst any bubbles here, but it's not, there is no magic that would make a tie help you in a practical sense. but it probably acquires some psychological value where you just feel better wearing it in the moment. Doesn't mean that you will perform better later on, although the theory, you know, the question that it raises is, is the psychological benefit, even though it's not magical, will that translate into a better performance, you know, later on? And that is the million dollar question that a number of psychologists are trying to answer. It's sort of a superstition placebo effect. Yes, yes. And I mean, this is particularly prevalent, I think, among athletes, whether they're wearing their lucky socks or, of course, there is the famous, all the stories around Wade Boggs who had some incredible rituals that he went through before he played ball games.

Can you just talk about him because I'm not sure that all our listeners know what Wade Boggs used to go through. Yeah. kept help to keep the you know Wade Boggs alive as a memory he's long he's long since retired from baseball but he was a he was a third basement uh for both the red sox and the yankees which is quite a trick when you think about it and uh he he was an he was a very good hitter he was he won the batting title several times and he is in the hall of fame uh but he was probably one of the most superstitious athletes you know ever and that's saying something that's because athletes really are superstitious. But in high school, he had a chicken dinner or chicken for

lunch or something and then went out and hit four for four. He was at bat four times and he got four hits. And that was it. From that point on, he never didn't eat chicken before going, you know, before playing in a baseball game. And so he believed, he really believed that chicken, made him hit better, which of course is scientifically not possible, but nonetheless, he believed it, and it probably helped him psychologically. He also had many, many rituals that he performed at the game. One of the things that is something that encourages the development of superstitions is having some anxiety about something that's coming up, and then having time to fill, where you're, you know, you can't practice, you can't sleep, you can't do any of the other, the practical things that would prepare you for the performance, and yet there's time to fill.

And so he actually had something like a three-hour-long ritual that he went through prior to each game. And it involved, you know, a certain number of kinds of practice throws and not stepping on the line of, you know, the first. foul line when you entered the field and then stepping on it when you left. And he also would write the Hebrew letter Kai in the dirt as he stepped into the batter's box for luck. And so he was really out there. But, you know, he also hit very well. So he didn't have any disconfirming information that would stop him. I used to watch him play when I lived in New York. I didn't know what he was doing with his toe in the dirt, but now I do.

Yes. So there are a lot of religious beliefs and practices, and I don't mean to be disrespectful, but they seem a lot like superstition. I mean, I was raised a Roman Catholic. We would bless ourselves with holy water as we entered the church. The sacraments of baptism and confirmation involve casting out the devil. They're Catholic churches, especially in Europe and South America, that display relics of saints, which are actually human bones.

And I'm sure we can name a lot of other practices that are similarly unorthodox. But where is the boundary between superstition and religious belief? What's the difference? How do we move from magical to something that's actually mystical and part of a dogma? Good question. You know, there are different ways to approach this. idea, but the way I would think about it, there are a couple of things I can say. First is, if the religious person is making a claim about the natural world, right? For example, that prayer can

heal people or that, or that the laying on of hands can heal people, right? Well, then I'm the kind of person who would say, I would like to see the evidence to support that. That's a natural world claim, it's testable, and I would place evidence above belief in that circumstance. However, there are many things, even some of the things you mention, where the people may engage in those practices, and they're not doing so while having any supernatural beliefs. I know that, I know, for example, that Holy Water is used in a number of ways in the church, and it does have a relationship to exorcism, to driving out the devil and so forth. But on the other hand, there is growing evidence.

There's some relatively interesting new line of research that suggests that rituals when practiced are beneficial, that both in the moment, that they lower anxiety if you're practicing doing a ritual and that they can, in some cases, enhance performance. But here's the thing. It doesn't matter whether the ritual is a religious or a superstitious ritual. It can be just a secular straight ritual. Someone tells you do these things. And so it's the ritual, not the belief.

And so I guess what I would say is that if you are believing, as you're performing these acts in a church or in a religious community, if you're believing in things that are not consistent with science as you do them, then you're possibly in the realm of superstition, because I think sciences ultimately are judge on those things, if they're testable. On the other hand, if you're doing them simply as part of a community, as a ritual that we do that shows that we are part of this community and for its immediate psychological benefits,

then without necessarily going over into the supernatural, then I wouldn't call it a superstition. I would call it a ritual that's part of a community and so on. So I think it's really all about how you are thinking about it as you do it. It's meaning for you and also the claims that you're making about it if you're thinking that it's going to have some benefit in the real world. So you've written that you are not superstitious yourself, but how did you become interested in study?

the psychology of superstition. I mean, this is not, you know, a huge field of study within the discipline. True. Yeah. So that's a good question and one that I love to go back and think about. So I've discovered, for whatever reason, early on in my career, that I was interested in things that people do that don't quite make sense. Irrational things. That not things that are psychopathological, you know, not things that are psychological problems, but things that normal people do that are either against their own interests or just not quite rational. And I discovered long ago, I read an article that was actually by Barry Schwartz back when I was in graduate school. and it was an article about students doing a computer game where they were not told how it worked.

It was very simple, rudimentary computer game where they were just pressing buttons. And they were not told how it works, worked. And at the end, they were asked to describe, how did you get the points to come, right? Well, when the points didn't, came sort of randomly, they made up all these crazy theories. You have to go two over here and then three down. And I just found this so fascinating. And I went to my graduate advisor at the time and said, look, we have to drop everything and study this. This is really cool.

And he sort of patted me on the head and said, no, go back and do your work. And when I finally got my own lab and could do my own research, I started to do some research on it. And it has kept me busy in one form or another for a long time. But I find the kind of foibles of human behavior to be both interesting and sort of endearing in a way. And so that has been the sort of overriding interest and continues to be to this day. So it would seem that we're pretty much hardwired to, if not be superstitious, we're always trying to make order out of chaos. And some of that seems to manifest itself in what you just described, people thinking that if you play the game,

this way it's going to work for you. Right. Exactly. And some of the, you know, so it is, I think, hardwired into us. And there's a sense in which we sort of overdetermine the cause and effect relationships. You know, we, that many of the superstitions that, that have made, are maintained by individuals or have been maintained over the years, are kind of low cost, right? Like you could, and certainly the personal superstitions, not only the low cost, but in many cases they're private. You don't run out and tell people that necessarily that you have this lucky coin in your pocket or whatever. Maybe you will, but the trusted person, but it's not the first thing you tell people about. And so it can be

employed simply and without much cost, and it makes you feel better in the moment. And so many superstitions, I think, are aimed at some kind of grasping at control, an illusion of control, if you will, and they're low-cost. They don't do any harm. In most cases, there are some that I think that are dangerous, but the great majority of superstitions are ones that we can employ, and it may look a little odd, but they don't cause any harm. What are the dangerous superstitions? I mean, you're taking us back to the Salem witch trials and some of those kinds of activities? Well, yes.

I'm hopeful that post-enlightenment, those are not, we're not going to have any more witch trials. But those were definitely, those were definitely dangerous beliefs. But no, I'm thinking more in terms of things like superstitions about gambling, which may keep you at the table longer than you should be. And people should recognize, you know, that gambling is the odds are against you. and that there is no luck. You know, the concept, people believing in the concept of luck,

that I can get lucky, can be dangerous in that situation. And, you know, it's all math. It's all very straightforward. There are some games that involve strategy. My understanding is that poker is a game that because there's a human factor, it's possible to win. But my understanding is that most professional poker players, if you work it out on an hourly basis,

are not making much money, even if they are making money. The other thing is that I would put alternative medicines into the category of superstition. We don't think of it that way often, but many alternative medicines are inconsistent with science, and they are, you know, you're attempting to do something healthy with them, but they can be dangerous. You know, there have been cases of people who use homeopathic medicines or naturopathic medicines instead of going to a doctor with very dire results. And so that's an example where I think we should go with science and not adopt those alternative medicines. Are there any character traits that are consistent with people who are more likely?

to be superstitious or demographic groups or is it about age or sex or anything like that? Well, I think that I think the most important demographic is having grown up in a family where superstition is a real thing. You know, in other words, that we acquire so much from our families. We require our religions in most cases from our families. So it's just one of those things where you, if you don't grow up in a family where this is even thought, talked about or is in any way given credence, then you're not going to be superstitious. So that's a big thing. But once you are, once you are, it's a possibility with you that you might be superstitious. There are some personality traits that are, that are

associated with it. Most of them not very pleasant. They're like trade anxiety. If you're an anxious person, you can imagine that would be the case. People who are high, and fear of death are slightly more likely to be superstitious. People who have this concept in psychology we talk about as being locus of control, meaning that you either have control inside yourself. I have control and I'm the master of my fate or the control is outside and I'm sort of buffeted by life. The people with external locus of control who feel as though they're low on their ability to control events are more likely to be superstitious in an effort to gain more control.

So there are some personality traits that have shown to be associated with it. But the good news on that front is that the relationships are all fairly weak. You know, if you're, for example, knowing that you have high anxiety is not going to give us a whole lot of information about whether you're superstitious or not, and vice versa. And so there are some relationships there that are sort of expected as you might. They go in the direction you might think they would, but they're not powerful. I think it's much more a case of your culture, your upbringing, and your personal experiences that are likely to make it happen.

Is there a relationship between superstition and obsessive-compulsive disorder, which can look almost superstitious. if I have OCD and I need to count everything or go through rituals in order to leave the house. Yeah. I mean, this is the psychological disorder that looks the most like superstition. It is, you know, the compulsive rituals and so on that people must do or else something bad will happen. My understanding of this is that there isn't a whole lot of a relationship between the two. they look the same, but it's far more severe in the other case, in the OCD case. And there isn't any, you know, they've done studies where kids who are sort of anxious and ritualistic, young, whether they turn into people with OCD as they age.

And I don't think they've found anything that is a relationship there. The other thing to keep in mind is that, you know, according to surveys, 50% of people or more, I mean, say that there's at least a little superstitious. So it's pretty widespread. It's not something that we have to worry about it being a psychological problem unless it does get excessive, or if you choose these what I will call dangerous superstitions. Well, thank you for joining me today, Dr. Weiss. It's been really interesting talking to you.

and of course I wish you the best of luck in all your future endeavors. Thank you. You too. It was a pleasure to be here. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology at www.org or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're inclined to, please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingof psychology at APA.org. That's Speaking of Psychology, all one word, at APA.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Wynerman. Our sound editor is Chris Kondyin.

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.