A week or two ago, Erich provided a link [1] to a page entitled, “Why Won’t God Heal Amputees?” [2]. The site has a number of excellent videos, among them a 10-minute short that equates prayer with any other form of superstition [3]. If not equal in terms of dogmatic obedience, prayer and superstition at least share the same degree of efficacy: absolutely none whatsoever. So why do superstitions form, and in spite of their pointlessness, stick?
For some background, let’s rewind to the 1940’s. In this decade B.F. Skinner [4], the psychologist who essentially founded behaviorism, conducted the most groundbreaking studies on behavioral conditioning this side of Pavlov’s salivating dogs [5]. Even if you can’t recite his findings from rote-memory like a Psych 101 student, you know some of the terminology his studies created- positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, and the concept of “behavioral conditioning” itself.
Not as well known, Skinner’s research on pigeons also suggested one way superstitious behavior comes into practice. Skinner placed some of his infamous pigeons in a cage attached to a mechanism that delivered food at a totally random interval. [6] The birds soon began to associate their own behavior with the food delivery, and kept repeating whatever they had done at the time food entered the cage, as though this would initiate more food.
The conditioning led to a variety of bizarre bird “superstitions”. Skinner reported birds that “turned counter-clockwise about the cage”; “thrust [their heads] into one of the upper corners of the cage”; and “developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head…swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a much slower return.” All of these behaviors continued repeatedly, the birds always expecting their bobbings and spinnings to cue a reward. This may not sound fully like human superstitions. To hear Skinner explain it:
“The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking. There are many analogies in human behavior. Rituals for changing one’s luck at cards are good examples. A few accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences suffice to set up and maintain the behavior in spite of many unreinforced instances. The bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if he were controlling it by twisting and turning his arm and shoulder is another case in point.
These behaviors have, of course, no real effect upon one’s luck or upon a ball half way down an alley, just as in the present case the food would appear as often if the pigeon did nothing–or, more strictly speaking, did something else.” –Skinner, B. F. (1948). ‘Superstition’ in the pigeon. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38, 168–172.
And thus we have the formation of a superstitious act. You wear a pair of socks to a winning game, and they become your “lucky socks”. You give an actor a strange well-wishing before a successful performance, and everyone from then on says, “Break a leg.”
Speaking of leg, let’s return to the God Hates Amputees [7] example. You can pray to God, you can wish on a lucky horseshoe, and you can sprinkle salt over your shoulder in hopes to grow a detached limb back, but none will do the trick. Even though they don’t work, we continue to follow (and trust) superstitions. Shouldn’t they phase themselves out, a kind of psychological natural selection?
Superstitions don’t rapidly fall into extinction for several reasons. First, a quick return to Skinner. As part of his research on conditioning, Skinner also studied the way people and other animals respond to receiving rewards for their behavior. Paradoxically, we follow a behavior with more devotion if we don’t get rewarded reliably or all of the time. This makes more sense when you consider the following examples:
A vending machine. You insert money into the machine (a behavior), you get a refreshment (a reward). You can rely on a vending machine to reward you for inserting money every time. Unless of course the machine breaks. If you feed money into a vending machine and don’t get to purchase a refreshment, you probably won’t risk paying into the machine again.
But suppose a vending machine didn’t claim to guarantee a reward for every payment received. Then you’d have:
A slot machine. You insert money into a slot machine (behavior), and often, even usually, win nothing. But sometimes, seemingly at random, the machine will give you a payout (reward). You can’t trust a slot machine to pay you all of the time, but you know it will pay you sometimes. You (and any other animal for that matter) will stay at an unreliable, unpredictable slot machine much longer than a once-reliable vending machine that has somewhere gone wrong.
Skinner called the way a slot machine rewards gambling behavior a variable-ratio schedule [8]. Clinging to a lucky penny or sacrificing a goat to a god works the same way- sometimes it pays off (or so it seems), and sometimes it doesn’t. But like Skinner’s dancing, starving pigeons, it often seems worth the risk.
Superstitions also stick because of the sheer evolutionary psychology defending them. What? That doesn’t make sense! And yet it does- remember that natural selection only weeds out things that prove harmful to a species’ prolonged existence. Prayer and other superstitions may often prove utterly ineffective, but rarely do they have an adverse effect. A recent book describes this phenomenon, Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things [9]. The answer- essentially- Why not?
And in that limbo superstitions remain, the psychological equivalent of the human appendix or men’s nipples. Too useless to truly influence results, too harmless to fade away. But they leave a legacy, in the form of a culture filled with good luck charms, religions that fall back on prayer, and other bizarre rituals that make us look, well, bird-brained. For past discussion on the psychology of silly beliefs and behaviors, see here [10] and here [11].
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