One day some years ago, I was walking down the street, basking in the beautiful sunlight o’ life, and I happened to glance up right as a giant black raven flew overhead. Then I looked down at the precise moment a black cat streaked in front of me. The cat surprised me so much that I stumbled and realized I just walked under a ladder, and then I smashed into a mirror, knocked over a salt-shaker, and finally, stepped on a crack.
According to superstition, I had just broken my mother’s back, given myself at least 7 years of bad luck and/or a death sentence.
Fortunately for me, that never actually happened. And fortunately for my conscience, I know that these are just superstitions that have no roots in reality. And I know that superstitions are all in my head. Humans are wired to be superstitious – we are obsessed with order and patterns, constantly trying to make sense out of chaos. That’s why we see “signs” everywhere, and try to turn random occurrences into “causes” and consequences to logical “effects.”
It’s why Ichiro Suzuki can’t bat without his signature “squat-and-stretch” routine, it’s why my friend Jimmy can’t play a basketball game unless he puts on his shoes and socks in the correct order, and it’s why my friend Sam has to hide her thumbs when she’s driving past a graveyard.
Blame evolution, and then blame your culture. Don’t understand? Consider the following:
Suppose your smaller-brained hunter-gatherer ancestor was walking along through the dark woods one clear October evening, when suddenly he hears a rustling in bushes. His brain processes the information and interprets it thus:
it could be
a) a bird,
b) the wind,
c) any other mundane, non-life threatening thing, or
d) A GIANT RAZOR-SHARP-TOOTHED MANBEARPIG.
While statistically it was more likely that the rustling was just a bird or the wind, it was much more evolutionarily beneficial to assume the worst. If your ancestor had ignored the rustling and was consequently killed by a half-man-half-bear-half-pig, then he would not have been able to pass on his genes and therefore you would not exist. He made a good choice, right? In one paragraph I just broke down a thousands-of-years-old evolutionary trait into a cost/benefit analysis. Does it really take that much effort to step over the crack, compared to how much if could hurt your dear mother if it were true? Does it really take that much effort to put on your lucky underwear before a final, compared to how much scholarship money you’d lose if you failed the class?
Nevertheless, superstitions are rampant throughout the world.
In China, the number 4 is unlucky because the Chinese word for four is the same for “death.” In 2001, a study was done to investigate a medical myth called “The Baskerville Affect,” or death by fright (from Sir Walter Scott’s famous Hound of the Baskervilles). The authors of the study actually found that deaths of Chinese and Japanese chronic heart disease patients “peaked” around the fourth of every month, seemingly due to the psychological stress of the number four. A similar study was done with Caucasians, but no such results were found.
Then there’s Murphy’s Law, or: What Can Go Wrong, WILL, or: Don’t Tempt Fate. If you drop your toast, of course it’s going to land on the buttered side. The moment you step into that nice hot relaxing shower, of course the phone is going to ring. The one day you’re finally free enough to catch up on all those episodes of Gossip Girl, of course the Internet is going to fail.
John Tierney, who writes the blog “Tierney’s Lab” for the New York Times, wrote about a study done by Jane Rosin and a colleague from Cornell, Thomas Gilovich, and a group of college students. They found that the students thought it was more likely to get caught in a rainstorm if you didn’t carry an umbrella. In other words, if you tempt fate – say, by not carrying an umbrella when there had been a forecast for rain – fate will retaliate by drenching you.
In another blog entry Tierney wrote that psychologists believe that for people buying life insurance before flying, it’s no coincidence the plane didn’t crash. To those people, the fact that they bought life insurance stopped the plane from crashing.
So the next time you get your hand stuck in a mousetrap, slip on a banana peel, and fall headlong into a vat of turkey giblets, remember: it’s not Friday the 13th’s fault, and it’s not because you opened an umbrella inside. Your brain is trying to blame it on Friday the 13^th because it really likes to make connections and recognize patters, but really, it’s just a regular day and you happened to fall on some bad times. So pull yourself out of the turkey guts, pick up that banana peel, and seize the day, superstition free!
Have burning questions about the world that could only be answered by a scientist? Send them to [email protected], and I will dedicate my life to finding out the answers for you, which will be posted the following Tuesday.