The tendency towards superstition

[tmackean]

I'd like to think I'm a rational thinker and not prone to faulty superstitious reasoning, but I caught myself ruminating in a decidedly superstitious way, recently, and it got me thinking about the inherent ability of us all to fall into irrational thought processes.

There's been a few consecutive events in the last week that weren't positive outcomes for me. I'm resisting the use of words such as "a run of bad luck" here, but you know what I mean! Also, for the past week, I've been wearing an old watch, as a more recent watch I bought hasn't been keeping consistent time. As I got dressed the other day, I reached for my watch, and thought "Hang on - I've been wearing this old watch all week, and it's been a bad week. Maybe if I switch back to my new watch, things will get better!". Ridiculous, but not the first time I've been tempted to think in an irrational way.

It seems to be that all of us, skeptic or not, have tendencies toward such fallacious paranormal reasoning. The brain is an extraordinary organ, with incredible abilities to derive patterns from all of our senses, but sometimes we go a little far. When we see a face on mars, or the Virgin Mary on a cheese toastie, we call it pareidolia, but when we allow ourselves to concoct imaginary connections between events, we call it superstition, or we call it a conspiracy theory or we call it.... religion.

It's believable, I think, to imagine that the roots of religion were in superstitious reasoning of this nature; slaughter some cattle and the rain will come, for instance. Unconnected events joined only by coincidence.

By this reductive reasoning, it occurs to me that almost every incidence of paranormal phenomena arises simply from that one amazing but occasionally overzealous skill; pattern matching.

Or am I simplifying things just a little too much?

 

[Nihilanth]

I think it's just our need to have control over an otherwise uncontrollable situation. As you said, you were having a bad week; it's only natural to want to change that, and your mind seized on what it thought was a way out. I don't think it's as much the mind seeing patterns as it is the person wanting to feel like they finally have some amount of control over reality. Like, they no longer have to suffer the whims of fate or whatever, because now they can just light some candles or say a mantra or plead with the deity of their choice. Even if it doesn't work, it's all they really have, and it's hard to get rid of.

I know I say this a lot (or maybe not), but I think skeptics are pretty brave sometimes. I say sometimes because I still curl up in a ball on the floor and squeal like a woman whenever someone acts like they're going to hit me.

 

[MortFurd]

Snip...

By this reductive reasoning, it occurs to me that almost every incidence of paranormal phenomena arises simply from that one amazing but occasionally overzealous skill; pattern matching.

Or am I simplifying things just a little too much?

I would tend to agree that the human mind's capability for pattern finding is responsible for a very large percentage of paranormal incidents - with fraud and mistaken observation making up the balance.

On the subject of coincidences, I note that at the time I posted this reply, both pmckean and nihilanth both show 116 posts to their names on the JREF forums. What's it mean? Not one blipping thing, except that I happened to look at post counts for those two users during that period of time when they both had the same number of posts. No further significance - unless you are into some kind of numerology or other form of hocus-pocus. I have no idea what such folks would make of the coincidence.

 

[Soapy Sam]

I'd By this reductive reasoning, it occurs to me that almost every incidence of paranormal phenomena arises simply from that one amazing but occasionally overzealous skill; pattern matching.

Or am I simplifying things just a little too much?

If so, I suspect you are in good company. I have shared both your experience and your tentative conclusion and I think many of us must have. It can be surprisingly hard to simply dismiss such thinking- and after a while, unconscious habits develop which we no longer think about at all.

 

[Dancing David]

It's believable, I think, to imagine that the roots of religion were in superstitious reasoning of this nature; slaughter some cattle and the rain will come, for instance. Unconnected events joined only by coincidence.

By this reductive reasoning, it occurs to me that almost every incidence of paranormal phenomena arises simply from that one amazing but occasionally overzealous skill; pattern matching.

Or am I simplifying things just a little too much?

You hit it on the head, in behavioral psychology, the term superstition means a stimulus that becomes associated with the reward but is not directly connected to it. (I think, I could be wrong here, it has been a while)

And add to this that amongst the associative processing we do, a lot of it is non-'word' cognition, feelings, impressions:"intuitions", which serve us very well. But they can have a basis that needs to be exmined.

It is useful to recognise things like "Which other humans are a threat to me?" without thinking in words about it, but these impressions can be false and misleading.

 

[Jeff Corey]

You hit it on the head, in behavioral psychology, the term superstition means a stimulus that becomes associated with the reward but is not directly connected to it. (I think, I could be wrong here, it has been a while)

In fact, Skinner's original demonstration was that a behavior that was immediately followed by a reinforcer tended to be repeated, even through the connection was completely accidental. That has been shown in a variety of species, including pigeons, rats and humans.

 

[fuelair]

I
I know I say this a lot (or maybe not), but I think skeptics are pretty brave sometimes. I say sometimes because I still curl up in a ball on the floor and squeal like a woman whenever someone acts like they're going to hit me.

Taurus .357,hammerless,2"barrel loaded with Hydrashocks.

 

[Nihilanth]

On the subject of coincidences, I note that at the time I posted this reply, both pmckean and nihilanth both show 116 posts to their names on the JREF forums. What's it mean? Not one blipping thing, except that I happened to look at post counts for those two users during that period of time when they both had the same number of posts.

HAHA! That's what we WANTED you to think!

...

...okay, I got nothing.