Rationally Speaking #13 - Superstition, Is It Good For You?

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 18 July 2010

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Is it possible that superstition is actually good for you? Well, it turns out that superstition may, at least some of the time, have beneficial effects. A paper published in 2008 in Science for example, suggests that lacking control over a situation increases people’s propensity to see illusory patterns — the implication being that the latter (a typical component of superstition) ameliorates stress when we feel that things are out of hand. Also, a recent study published in Psychological Science shows that superstition improves people’s performance on certain tasks, presumably by making them more self-confident than they would be otherwise. Add to this a recent article in Scientific American to the effect that people with Asperger’s syndrome are less likely to project agency onto life’s events (and hence tend to be less superstitious), and suddenly the skeptic might not feel so cocky about being skeptical.

Of course we're not advocating in favor of superstition on the sole ground that it may be psychologically helpful. Still, what happens when something that we devote so much time fighting against turns out not to be entirely bad after all?

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Rationally Speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.
0:22.6	For more information, please visit us at NYCCEPtics.org.
0:35.7	Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
0:41.2	I'm your host, Massimo Piliucci, and with me, as always, is my co-host Julia Galev.
0:46.1	Julia, what are we going to talk about today?
0:48.3	Well, Massimo, this is our 13th episode, so you know what that means.
1:06.2	Very superstition.
1:08.9	Specifically, I want to ask, what makes people superstitious?
1:12.9	And I mean that question on multiple levels. First, what kind of situations trigger our tendency
1:18.9	towards superstitious thinking? And then on a deeper level, why do we have that tendency in the first
1:23.6	place? Oh, and I also want to talk about the question you raised in the teaser on our blog. Are there any benefits to superstitious thinking? Well, it turns out that if we start with
1:31.7	the latter, it turns out that there appears to be some benefits. In fact, the idea for part of the
1:38.4	readings that I did in preparation for this podcast came from one of our colleagues and friends,
1:43.9	Steve Novella, who actually
1:46.2	published an article recently on June 7, about superstition on his blog, Neurologica, and he raised
1:54.4	this particular question, is superstition all bad? And it turns out that there now
1:59.8	begins to be enough research out there that we can start
2:02.8	answering the question.
2:03.7	So, for instance, one of the most recent articles on the topic is in psychological science
2:10.0	published in May 2010.
2:13.4	And the title is, keep your fingers crossed how superstition improves performance.
2:16.9	And it turns out that the authors have done a series of experiments where they showed that if,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New York City Skeptics, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of New York City Skeptics and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.