Why We're Superstitious

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Todd A. Gipstein / Corbis

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Much of your book is about childhood development, and how these ideas about the world are formed earlier than most people think.

Myself and a number of colleagues around the word study infant development, the natural course of development before formal education has had the chance to step in. We're interested in to what extent is stuff built in, and to what extent culture and the environment play a role. What's been remarkable is how, over the past twenty years, our understanding has grown that babies have surprising capacities to interpret the world and make inferences about what they think is going on, in the physical world, about the nature of objects. They're doing all this kind of stuff and no one's telling them how to do it. It's untutored, it's spontaneous. And this leads them to make many assumptions. And sometimes those assumptions are misguided. For example, if you think that your teddy bear can come alive at night when you're not watching it, or if you think that it gets lonely or has feelings of remorse, than you would be misappropriating a psychological property to an inanimate object. So, that would be an example where a child makes a misconception.Those misconceptions can become the basis of adult supernatural beliefs.

Talk about this experiment that you did a few years back which demonstrated just how ingrained and knee jerk these beliefs can be.

I'm not going to take credit for that experiment. It was Paul Rozin who demonstrated it, I simply adapted for a large audience to make a dramatic point. At some point during the talk, I'll pull out a fountain pen and say, "This belonged to Albert Einstein," and people will coo and ask to hold it. People want to physically touch things. And then I'll pull out a tattered sweater and will say, "Here's a sweater from somebody famous. You might want to put it on." Of course, everyone's suspicious, but then you offer them fifty bucks and most people will put their hands up. And then I'll say, "Would you still wear this sweater if you knew it belonged to Jeffrey Dahmer?" And the majority of hands shoot down. It's usually a very rapid response accompanied by nervous giggling. And you ask people why did they do that and they'll say, "It just seems wrong," and then they'll come up with all these post-hoc explanations. "Well, maybe there was some physical issue with Jeffrey Dahmer, maybe he had some illness that could be contaminating," or "I don't want to be seen to be doing something that the rest of the group thinks is bad." There are these responses towards events which trigger all sort of very rapid behaviors that you can, after the event, justify with a level of reason. But it's already after the fact. You've already made a decision on an intuitive level.

So are you saying that this supersense is good, or bad?

I think it's good for the simple reason that it's still around today. It's obviously conferred some advantages. I think it's adaptive on the individual level in that, if you believe you can control uncontrollable situations, it makes them less stressful. So the role of personal ritual is very useful in dealing with situations where you feel threatened. But I also think that the supersense could operate at the social level. What I mean by that is that if everyone in a group buys into the possibility that there are some values that are sacred in a group, then this serves as a consensus that helps the group cohere. There have to be some things which no one member of the group, no individual, can own outright. It has to transcend the mundane, it has to be something that goes beyond the earthly level, it has to almost become profound. It can be a book, it can be a temple, it can be a rock, it can be a tree. Every kind of culture or group has this.

What should people walk away from this book thinking?

The takeaway message of the book is that, really, we should be cautious at ridiculing or diminishing other people's beliefs because we all entertain beliefs. Once we recognize that, we can be a little bit more understanding of where they come from. If you read this book, you'll certainly never be a bore at a dinner party. Everyone has experiences, and you're dealing with a lot of deep-seated convictions which are very difficult to get people to abandon. So in reading the book, you're going to discover a whole realm of thoughts that most people never even considered as being supernatural.

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