Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptics.org.

Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I am your host, Massimo Piliucci, and with me as always is my co-host, Julia Galev.

Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Massimo, we have a guest with us in studio today.

I'd like to welcome Matthew Hudson to the show.

Matthew is a science journalist in New York City. He has degrees in cognitive science and in science writing from Brown and MIT. And he was the news editor at Psychology Today for four years from 2006 to 2010. And he's also freelanced for a bunch of other great publications, including Wired, Discover, Scientific

American Mind, and the New York Times Magazine. And most recently, he has published a book called

The Seven Laws of Magical Thinking, which we are going to explore in detail during the episode. Welcome,

Matt. Great to be here. So, Matt, what's the basic idea? Superstition is good. Well,

I started out not with the idea to argue that superstition is good.

I basically wanted to explain superstition.

I argue that we all have a tendency to believe in magic on at least some deep level.

We all tend to believe in things like luck and God and life

after death and essences and destiny and karma and that sort of thing. So first I just wanted

to try to figure out why this type of rationality is so common. And then I wanted to look

at what the effects are, what are the upsides and the downsides.

And to me, the more surprising aspect was that there are some upsides. Even though these are illusions, there are some benefits to these illusions.

So can you give us an example of a good superstition?

So the belief in luck, for instance, there's one study I like to cite in which subjects were

given a golf ball and asked to make 10 golf putts.

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