101 Things I Learned in Psychology School by Tim Bono

Author:Tim Bono [Bono, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2023-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

55

Percentage of respondents holding superstition

Source: YouGovAmerica poll of 1,000 Americans, April 26–30, 2022

Superstition results from inadvertent reinforcement.

When something good or bad happens, we might associate it with unrelated things happening at the same time. A student who aces an exam might attribute it to wearing a blue T-shirt, then wear the shirt for all future exams. A baseball player who tapped the plate three times before getting a hit may believe it made him a better hitter. Such associations are the result of illusory correlation, the erroneous belief that separate events are related. We often base such generalizations on a single case.

The behaviorist B. F. Skinner argued that pigeons behave in a way that is analogous to human superstition. He gave them food at regularly timed intervals. If food happened to be administered right after a pigeon cooed or tilted its head, the pigeon would coo or tilt again to receive more food, even though the behavior and the feeding were unrelated.

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