Is superstition a major part of the human psyche?
It seems that humans are extremely, by default/nature, superstitious. That is to say that we possess thought patterns and behaviors that are meant to "make things go well or stay well". If things are going well (something positive has just happened to us), we don't want to "jinx" it by thinking of something negative. This causes irrational behavior, as perhaps the looming (or actual) threat is ignored because we don't want to jinx our good time with bad thoughts. This is just one example of many of how, psychologically, we try to preserve or solicit good fortunes. Of course, in the past (and presently among the still religious), prayer, ritual, and the like acted as solicitations of the god(s) for the good life. In less structured settings, it could be folk rituals. It might even explain the basis for why psychological conditions persisted (and may have been maladaptations) of a mind that is largely based on (the need for) superstitious thinking. The person most scrupulous about ritual, most adept at the inner calls for adherence to superstition became medicine men, priests and the like. If it goes too far, it becomes a basis of obsessive-compulsive disorder, crippling the person, as superstition and psycho-somatic symptoms manifest the beliefs into maladaptive behaviors that no longer use it as a salve, but engulf the person's daily actions.
Anyways, long story short, superstition is a core component of the human psyche is the claim.
Anyways, long story short, superstition is a core component of the human psyche is the claim.
Comments (43)
Superstition is hard to define, but I think we all know that this is not the definition of superstition. Someone who has thought patterns and behaviors intended to make things go or stay well is a human being, not a superstitious human being.
Merriam-Webster, 'Superstition':
1a: a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation
1b: an irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God resulting from superstition
2: a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary
Superstitions are not the same as compulsions. The compulsion to count things isn't superstitious -- it's just slightly crazy. The lucky red shirt isn't crazy -- it's just slightly stupid.
Still, compulsions and superstitions can provide the sense of having control over the world, which tends to be important to us, given that we do not have control over a lot of things. A professor said, "Magic is religion you don't believe in; religion is magic you do believe in." A former priest said. "Nothing fails like prayer." Millions of people believe in the actual effectiveness of prayer (the gods will act) which is magic one believes in. Religious magic is basically superstitious.
So, my take is that many rational, intelligent, educated people feel better when they deploy whatever superstitious magic they believe in. And as luck would have it, things work out well enough often enough to provide support for magical thinking. And when it doesn't, there are other explanations available.
I'm wondering though if there is a connection between the two. Perhaps the compulsion is a maladaptive form of the superstitious tendency in humans. I think there is something to the fact that as you say:
Quoting BC
Yes, certainly there is "brain chemical imbalance" involved in the obsessive-compulsive, but can this imbalance be a matter of degree of already innate tendencies to irrationally try to control our environment, and "magical thinking" in general? Religion is the sociological coming together of psychological motivations to control things. OCD can be diagnosed very young, for example. This is not something you need to have many years of enculturation to have. Also, magical thinking occurs in many people without OCD. The compulsions are perhaps not there, but the impetus to control the environment through altered behavior and ritual patterns is.
I think what I defined and 1a seem pretty compatible. If you rather it be "superstitious behaviors", that's fine. "Superstition" encompasses a lot of things, and words can have family resemblances. I am talking about the kind whereby we try to control the world through ritual, belief, and behavior. I don't necessarily mean it in the "All irrational belief in various forces and causes", though this is a genre of that.
I'm not sure you're grasping how bad your definition is. According to your definition someone is superstitious if they get a haircut, or buy their girlfriend flowers, or exercise, because they are engaging in behavior meant to "make things go well or stay well."
"Superstition" is largely a pejorative word without a great deal of content, and this is why folks tend to have a hard time defining it. The definition process here is rather important.
As a follow up...and a sort of thought experiment...
What do you think of "psycho-somatic" disorders? This starts getting tricky because the delusions can be subtle.
So let's say that every time you touched a light switch before bed, you had to think of a particular thing in your mind- a white wall, otherwise your left nostril will get stuffy and you will not be able to sleep for the rest of the night. Let us say, you thought of a green wall or a blue gorilla eating pancakes under an umbrella in the arctic instead. You have to start again and flick the light switch on and then turn it off again.. But you realize, that you have to do it in sets of four, such that each time, you have to do it four times, and if you miss the 4th time, you have to start gain. Anyways, if you don't do it right, you actually feel your nose stuffy for the rest of the night. You aren't "fearing" a future event or something bad happening, something bad is happening. If someone says to you, "That's silly magical thinking", you can say, no I feel the stuffy nose right now as we speak. This is proven through your own introspection. In fact, the next day, you do the light switch ritual correctly, thinking of a white wall in sets of 4, and you get it right this time. And unlike the previous day, you actually feel your nose is not stuffy anymore. Voila! You are now back to normal and can have a good night sleep breathing normally and not fixating on a stuffy nose.
Well, is the ritual not, in all pragmatic senses of the word, causing the stuffy nose to go away and come back?
I see, well, I think I have defined it in a way that would preclude how you are generalizing its usage.
I literally just explained why that's false.
Superstition is a kind of religious excess, and that is why a secular age struggles to wield the word with any degree of accuracy. If we want to know whether X is part of the human psyche, we first need to figure out what in the world we mean by X. I think superstition is a variety of causal error, usually created by confusing correlation with causation. Still, to give the genre is not to give the definition.
I believe I addressed what concern you had of my original definition in my last post.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Chill
Very much so. And perhaps and argument can be given that we are quite superstitious today, we simply aren't aware of it or we have modified ancient beliefs into our modern outlook. For instance, some aspects of "scientism" are very much of the same caliber as believing in ghosts.
Not to mention the way we often treat presidents or nations. Quite a few other things.
It is more sophisticated, there may be less amount of it on the whole, but I think it's part of our nature.
I think we can readily split sociological forms of superstitious behavior from psychological superstitious/magical thinking behavior. I think, going to my point in my little debate with @Leontiskos not every ritual is a superstitious one. I think it has to be a component of "magical thinking". That is to say, there has to be a component of "Is this going to change reality in some way". One of the things that have changed over time, is that previously we might wholeheartedly just go along with the magical-thinking. Now, it can become a kind of neurosis (not technically, but analogously). That is to say, we might know X behavior is "irrational" but we still believe its effects on reality.
I don't know enough about It. From what I have read, people who have a 'psychosomatic condition' really do feel that something is wrong with them--feel, not just think. They can have real pain from a condition that doesn't actually exist. Some of these can be serious -- like unfortunate people who think one of their limbs actually belongs to somebody else. They don't 'recognize it' as their own.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I tend to separate superstitious thinking "Hey, this red shirt is a lucky charm!" from OCD "I HAVE TO count the chairs in my row, or I'll be really uncomfortable." I have a habit, or mild compulsion, to rinse out my glass before I fill it with cold water from the tap. I find a wet glass more appealing. A plastic glass, on the other hand, can't be helped by rinsing it out first. Yuck. It's a non-functional behavior. I used to have more of these, but they have faded away.
If one has OCD, I would suspect that new compulsions will be manufactured out of superstitious ideas -- like the lucky red shirt MUST be worn under various circumstances or something bad will happen.
The sometimes screwy things that go on in our brains (superstition, religious fervor, unreasonable fearfulness or confidence, hallucinations, etc.) could very well be connected -- I just don't know how. The brain is just so damned complicated.
Yes.. I think many people (maybe most) have some form of non-functional behavior related to magical thinking. At least, it's not as uncommon as we might think.. That will take empirical data of course to confirm.
Quoting BC
Yes, I am just wondering if OCD is more degree in an already exploitable trait. The brain has hijacked itself to fully commit to this predisposition for magical-thinking. As you say, someone who has the "plain old" magical-thinking tendency of normal humans, mildly believes in a connection of irrational thought. However, an OCD afflicted person has a rule-governed component that has hijacked this and maliciously exploits it by overemphasizing its efficacy on how it really effects reality.
A good example is the rituals of Christian worship. A lot of the ritual (like saying "The Lord be with you / and also with you") has no "magical value". The words of institution in the Eucharist (for Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans...) do have a "magical value". Chanting the psalm for the day is a ritual -- not a magical act. Same for kneeling during prayer. Baptism is a magical act. Confession, on the other hand, is ritual and therapy at the same time. Exchanging the sign of peace with other members of the congregation has no magical value. It's just a nice ritual.
Yes, very useful examples and analysis. However, I would only add that it should be explained how the magical act confers some positive or negative thing, or at least how it effects reality. So in the case of Christianity, it is a positive act because it is initiating one in the Way of Christ, or whatnot. However, some sects may only see it as symbolically cleansing one, and if not done, would have no real bones about it, as it confers nothing in any (material or spiritual) reality.
That sounds like a very sensible distinction.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Well, not that you have mentioned this, but let's put prayer to the side and take a common observation: most cultures do not condone say, mishandling a human body or not offering some sort of something in a kind of ritual (for a recently deceased person) and this does have a bit of magical thinking.
The issue becomes obscure when we do things such as celebrate Christmas or some other holiday. Is this superstition or is it mere ritual? And what would be the difference?
Quoting schopenhauer1
In some ways, yes, agreed.
Superstition goes hand in hand with ignorance, and because our age is wildly ignorant there is a high potential for superstition. For example, suppose Elon Musk said, "If you wave your iPhone in three big circles above your head after turning it on, the scrambling of the gyroscope will make it harder for political activists who are not in your contact list to send you unsolicited messages." People would instantly start doing this, and would probably soon swear by the practice. Why? Because we have no freaking idea how an iPhone works. Our scientific culture is faith-based, premised on arguments from authority. As Arthur Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
(The irrationality that emerged from Covid, left and right, was remarkable. Much of it could be called superstitious.)
Nice OP. I agree with your points.
Given humans are meaning making creatures, working hard to identify or make some order out of the chaos, we can't help ourselves but to anthropomorphise nature and machines and devise magical rituals to protect us, along with ways to please our gods or powers. Superstition seems to be a continuum - from the primitive to the sophisticated.
Perhaps religions are the most sophisticated forms of codefied superstition and are really just a way for us to connect with an imagined or hoped for explanatory higher power which will protect us now and/or in the next world. Often such protection is against the pervasive fear of nihilism. There Must Be Transcendent Meaning! People who follow religions will likely resent this and consider it a simplification. But if ignorance is the wellspring of superstition, couldn't we say that god (which is so often also a god of the gaps -Why something rather than nothing? Why evil? Why death? Why morality?) operates as a kind of fetish to help us manage our nescience?
Do you think there is good reason to hold that what counts as superstition needs to be unsophisticated pre-rational thinking and that if a 'magical' system is more scriptural and sophisticated it is no longer superstition?
Is it superstition, or subconscious deep learning. By rinsing a glass, you can remove a substantial amount of heat from the glass. Without pre-chilling the glass, the heat in the glass would warm your drink and result in less enjoyment of the coldness of your drink.
Sounds like subconscious thermodynamics to me. :nerd:
B is one of the causes of A. But A may also have other causes.
Well that too. I tend to go for Guiness.
Stella Artois for me. And I like it cold, even though it is a superior European product.
Baptism affects reality more subtly. Most Christians are baptized as infants and the magic is performed only once per person and is not redouble or undoable (according to the theology of the churches). Most people will work out the meaning of their magical baptism quite a few years after the act, unless they are baptized as adults. Or, they won't -- in which case, the magic is greatly diminished. The magic of the eucharist comes to naught as well if the individual just 'goes through the motions'.
This is all true for the rituals and magic in daily life as we know it. Air heads miss out on it.
:100:
What is your definition of 'magic'?
The rituals of the church are no more magical than the various rituals we perform every day, like saying 'hello' to people on the street, or thanking the bus driver for letting us off the bus.
The Christian practices you labeled magic are universally accepted to not be magic, except perhaps by Simon Magus. Some call them worship and others call them superstition, but no one thinks they are magic. This is relevant to the OP because in Judaism and Christianity superstition and magic go hand in hand.
Quoting BC
My guess is that the rituals fit your idiosyncratic definition of magic (i.e. spiritual or invisible causation). You just perceive them in a demythologized sense. For example, the "sign of peace" has not historically been understood as a bit of hand-shaking.
If we are logically consistent with this sort of definition then someone is engaged in magic if they go to the grocery store and believe themselves to be using free will to choose which milk to buy; just as if we are consistent with the OP's definition then the fellow who brushes his teeth is superstitious. A thread which centers on pejorative terms without rigorous definitions ends up being a vehicle for propaganda.
There's a lot to unpack in that, and I think there's very much legitimate issues pertaining to the politization of science, which was off the wall with Covic.
It's a bit strong to say out scientific culture is faith-based, maybe some parts of it are quite encased in certain ways of thinking, say, expecting that evo-devo will explain everything about human behavior, or that if we continue making AI even better, we will reach AGI, etc., these have adherents who verge on "superstition", but there are many exceptions too.
On the other hand, you are quite right to point out that people like Musk have a cult following, such that anything he says is considered gospel. Heck, his "predictions" on what "Neuralink" will be able to do are laughable.
I agree that there is a very clear sense in which, at bottom, we do not know how iPhones work. I would be even stronger in your last sentence, virtually every phenomenon in nature is a kind of magic, as I see it. The reason we no longer see it that way is because we have become used to it and thus take it granted.
Certainly, newborns experience the world as baffling to them, because it is.
I specifically had in mind people like Krauss or Dawkins, or worse yet Dennett or the Churchlands, who are just off the wall. It is this strain in thinking, which I regard as kind of "superstitious" - the belief that science will allow to understand everything eventually. It's crazy to me to think this, for obvious reasons.
Superstition is related to the unpredictable, so it has a real place in our being in the moment, living the passing of time. The huge, massive aspects of temporal continuity, such as the sun rising the next day, are so highly predictable that superstition has no place in those thoughts. However, in the tiny moments, and tiny spaces of temporal passage, much appears to be left to chance. Here, superstition has a role to play.
Those who live on the edge of time, in a rapidly evolving environment, such as a high risk occupation, or a professional athlete in a fast sport, are usually the ones who find the most purpose for superstition. In these situations a large part of a person's professional environment is completely unpredictable, and many of the happenings appear to be at the hands of fate, or chance. Since we really do not know what actually tips the scale (breaks the symmetry) in these circumstances, superstition is as good as anything else. You might say that superstition provides us with an appealing approach to superposition.
Interesting observation. It makes sense that people who make their living off their ability to act effectively in the heat of the moment are used to being able to go with their intuitions successfully, and tend to do so even when critical thinking might serve them better.
Yes, these are good points. The givenness of nature lends itself to wonder and precludes perfect comprehension. There is certainly an interesting way in which we approach science as a field superstitiously, endowing it with impossible attributes.
When the topic is Germanic beers, I want to suggest Duvel and Franziskaner if you can find them. My friends also like Omer and Victoria, but for me those are simply inferior Duvels.
Me and my friends also like St Feulilien.
What impossible attributes?
The point though, is that there is often no time for critical thinking. Decisions made on the fly in a rapidly evolving situation, such as the middle of a hockey game, cannot be pondered. So anything (including items of superstition) which might possibly be helpful toward ensuring the right decisions are made, and that things go smoothly, are welcomed into this lifestyle.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/09/sport/nhl-superstition-ice-hockey-spt-intl/index.html
Okay. It is a component of the human psyche. And if you read about the evolution of humans, the primal fear goes back to the prehistoric times when a lot of factors were not understood, but could wipe out their entire population.
We never really got rid of this primal fear in us -- similar to the appendix (why do we have it?). Despite the progress that humans made in all aspects of society, the primal instinct never went away.
Can all religious faiths and practices be classed as superstition?
Absolutely, the way I was using was like practical magic that affects the world, but the broader category of yes.
:up: This is an interesting topic. It seems to prove that humans had both irrational and rational aspect in their mental states from the start of the history. Presumably in the ancient times, the irrational aspect has been more dominating in life.
With the discovery of reason and logic by the ancient Greek philosophers, the rational aspects have grown and balancing the two. However, we can still see much irrational part of human psyche taking over the human life which had been more predominant and hidden aspect of human consciousness in the deep structure biologically and mentally.
I would say that everyone is superstitious in my broad sense of the idea.
We may have beliefs about guilt. That feeling guilty protects us from punishment. This need not be even consciously thought out.
We might have beliefs that certain types of stifling emotions around other people leads to a better life or prevents bad things from happening professionally, inter-personally, even when alone. These would count if this has actually not been demonstrated to us.
There might be beliefs about how a man or woman should act - and the sense that if we don't act 'properly' in these categories we will be less well off in some way.
I would think most people have confused notions about what exactly leads them to love or prevents the loss of love, and behave in ways that supposedly prevent problems or elicit love where we might not get it or as much.
Even secular people may feel like certain kinds of behavior or even attitudes draw punishment, even when they do not. Obviously I am not talking about criminal behavior or obvious social taboos, but rather subtler things we either try not to show/express or even feel. For example we might feel that feeling superior to someone who makes mistakes or makes a mistake in a given instance would lead to negative outcomes, even if someone suggested this idea out loud to us, we would deny any causal link, as long as no one noticed it. Despite this we may have learned patterns in childhood where we are phobic even to the hidden attitude or thought. (and the precise opposite superstition might be in place where a not having a superior attitude is seen as detrimental - not this would be different from merely being aware of a greater skill in a certain area)
There are cultural versions of these things. Some cultures have value judgments about how expressive one can or should be. And it can feel to members of that culture that more expression or less expression is wrong and detrimental, when in fact there is much more flexibility, even in one's own culture and one is not punished for moving away from the center of the bell curve.