When Chinese companies select dates for initial public offerings, they pick dates containing lucky numbers more frequently than statistics would expect, according to University of California, Irvine’s David Hirshleifer and Ming Jian and Huai Zhang of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Chinese companies also tend to pick telephone numbers with lucky numbers, says Zhang.
Traditional accounts of superstition insultingly blame superstitious beliefs on irrational or “primitive” thinking, but the fact that so many people hold superstitions—including NASA engineers—suggests that there is more to them. Researchers at Chicago Booth’s Psychology of Belief and Judgment Lab, among other places, are looking into a number of psychological phenomena surrounding magical judgments. Some explanations:
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It’s a way to gain control over the world.
Rather than focusing on people’s cognitive shortcomings, some accounts of superstition focus on people’s motivations. People believe and do things that go against logic in an attempt to understand and gain some semblance of control over the world, says Boston University’s Morewedge. “People tend to blame others more often for their negative outcomes and take responsibility for their positive outcomes,” he says. Magical thinking might come into play if you don’t get a promotion at work. You might determine that someone, perhaps an angry coworker, is impeding your progress.
This relates to a shared quest to explain our surroundings and regulate the uncertainty of our lives. Why has this stock gone up or down? Why isn’t my computer working? People believe things happen because there’s some design to our lives, design that goes beyond more rational explanations such as technological malfunctions. To some degree, we want to think events or outcomes have deliberate causes. “Attributing intentionality to an outcome allows you to feel you have control over it,” Morewedge says.
This applies to things as well as events. He finds that people are more likely to anthropomorphize a car or a computer if it’s acting unreliably. The owner may think the machine has a mind of its own, or that it’s been hacked. On the flip side, using random games such as Rock, Paper, Scissors, Morewedge finds that people think they can perform at their highest level when in the presence of a lucky object. “When they use these items, they have greater confidence that they can achieve performance-based goals,” he says.
Other research finds that people who don’t necessarily believe in karma nevertheless do good deeds for others in order to spark good outcomes for themselves.
Someone waiting for important news—such as a job offer or the results of medical tests—may think it wise to build up her karma bank so that the universe will reward her with the outcome she wants, according to research by University of Virginia’s Benjamin A. Converse, Risen, and Colby College’s Travis J. Carter. “When wanting and uncertainty are high and personal control is lacking, people may be more likely to help others, as if they can encourage fate’s favor by doing good deeds proactively,” they write.
A series of experiments tested this hypothesis, both in the lab and at a job fair, where the researchers looked to see under what conditions people were more likely to donate to charity. Their findings suggest that people invest in good karma when they want to get something in return that they know they can’t control. “People may proactively invest in [magical] systems in the hopes of improving their outcomes,” the researchers conclude.
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There’s nothing to lose.
Research also suggests that people who ostensibly know better succumb to superstition “because they have nothing to lose by doing it,” says University of California, Riverside’s Thomas Kramer. He sees magical thinking as related to the psychological belief of contagion, where objects exchange properties by way of touch or proximity. “[In contagion,] if a smart person touches a pen, some of that smartness transfers to the pen and to me,” he says. Along the same lines, some areas of homeopathic and alternative healing draw their purported impact from the idea that things that are alike share properties, which he says explains why some people in Asian cultures still adhere to the ancient belief that drinking the blood of a snake will increase strength and sexual prowess—with practitioners believing any short-term discomfort will have no lasting negative effects, and be outweighed by lasting positive ones.