Superstitions are common in situations where the factors that control outcomes are unpredictable or the consequences of something going wrong could be fatal. However, rituals are also common among many high-achieving individuals in situations where attention to detail can lead to success. Harrison Ford, Woody Allen, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder are just a few celebrities who allegedly engage in ritualistic behaviour. In a recent TV interview, the soccer star David Beckham described some of his unusual rituals:
I have got this disorder where I have to have everything in a straight line or everything has to be in pairs. I’ll put my Pepsi cans in the fridge and if there’s one too many then I’ll put it in another cupboard somewhere. I’ll go into a hotel room and before I can relax I have to move all the leaflets and all the books and put them in a drawer.22
Such behaviours reflect an obsessive attention to detail. It may be the case that those with a personality characterized by a need for discipline and control are more likely to achieve professional success in their striving for perfection. Such individuals can be found in all walks of life. We all know people who seem to pay excessive attention to detail and order. In about two out of every one hundred members of the general public, ritualistic behaviour that controls the individual’s life becomes the medical problem of obsessive–compulsive disorder. These sufferers have to engage in ritualistic behaviour and are incapable of breaking out of their routines. They are aware that their behaviours are odd, but that knowledge does not help. The irony is that, if prevented somehow from performing their rituals, they might not perform as well because of their increased anxiety that they are now luckless. These rituals give a sense of control in situations where control is important. So those with obsessive–compulsive disorder are not necessarily irrational, since this ‘illusion of control’ is psychologically comforting in comparison to no control at all.23
However, the belief that rituals work is supernatural. We may deny that rituals are based on supernatural beliefs and claim that many of them, such as throwing salt over one’s shoulder when it is spilled on the table, are no more than harmless traditional customs of long-forgotten origin, much like the Christmas rituals discussed earlier. But if we think there is nothing to them, why do we see an increase in such behaviour at times of crisis? During the first Iraq war in 1991, Saddam Hussein fired SCUD missiles indiscriminately into Te l Aviv. What could be more stressful than sheltering during an air raid, not knowing if your family is about to be killed? In subsequent interviews, those living in the highest-risk areas were asked about their experiences, and it was observed that during the conversation they ‘knocked on wood’ significantly more than those from low-risk areas. It’s not clear where the practice of rapping on wood to ward off bad luck first came from. It may be linked to the pagan practice of tapping on trees to signal one’s presence to the wood spirits, or maybe it’s a reference to the Christian cross. Who knows? Whatever its origin, the threat of danger triggered a superstitious behaviour.24 We may deny the supersense, but it nevertheless lingers in the background of our minds, waiting for an opportunity to make a guest appearance at times of stress, when rationality can so easily abandon us.
The beliefs behind superstitious practices may be supernatural, but here’s the interesting point: they do work to reduce the stress caused by uncertainty. Rituals produce a sense of control, or at least the belief that we have control even when we don’t. The illusion of control is an immensely powerful mechanism to immunize against harm, especially if it is unpredictable. Not only do we find it hard to think randomly, but we don’t like unpredictable punishment. We all know what it’s like waiting for something bad to happen. We just want to get it over and done with as soon as possible. As a child growing up in Scotland, I remember sitting outside the headmaster’s office waiting to be ‘strapped’ for fighting in the playground. I think it was my foreign accent that made me the focus of attention. By that age, stories about the Bogeyman were no longer effective, and corporal punishment was deemed the best deterrent. The strap was a barbaric leather belt specifically designed for whipping the hands – a practice that has now been outlawed. It wasn’t the pain of being strapped that was unbearable, however, so much as the wait and the sense of helplessness. I had no control over the situation. Studies of pain thresholds reveal that humans can tolerate much higher electric shocks if they think that they can stop the punishment at any point in comparison to those who do not think they have this option.25 Doing something, or believing that you can do something, makes the unpleasant more bearable. Without the perception of control, we are vulnerable to our supersense. When adults were asked to think back to a situation when they were without control, researchers discovered that participants were much more likely to see patterns in random pictures, to infer connections between events that happened by chance and even to believe that superstitious rituals were effective.26 In the absence of perceived control, people become susceptible to detecting patterns in an effort to regain some sense of organization. No wonder those stock market traders are clutching their ‘lucky’ rabbit’s feet as we feel the full brunt of the current economic world recession. ‘Doing nothing’ is not an option. Anything that we feel can affect outcome is better than nothing, because an inability to act is so psychologically distressing.
It is not just superstitious routines that reinforce the illusion of control. For many, this illusion explains the power of the mind and wishful thinking. The Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner has shown that the same causal mechanism can lead to ‘apparent mental causation’: an individual’s belief that his or her thoughts have caused things to happen when they are closely connected in time. Imagine that you wish someone harm and something bad actually happens to that person shortly afterward. Such a coincidence must occur regularly, but it is very hard not to think that you are responsible in some way. Wegner and his colleagues found that subjects who thought ill of someone behaving like a jerk believed that they had caused his subsequent headache. In fact, the ‘jerk’ was the experimenters’ confederate, and the setup was a scam. Nevertheless, adults readily linked these two events together as if they had cursed the ‘victim.’27 This is all the more apparent in young children, who still are not sure about the difference between mental thoughts and actions. They think that wishing can cause things to actually happen. However, Wegner’s research indicates that many adults continue to harbour such misconceptions even though they know that they should not think like this. For example, in games of chance such as gambling, people behave as if they have control when they don’t. They feel more confident about winning if they get to throw the dice. They prefer to bet before the dice are thrown rather than after. They think they are more likely to win the lottery if they choose the numbers, and so on. Such behaviour would be utterly absurd if deep down we did not think that we have some influence over events. This is because of our mind design.
Later on, I examine how mind design emerges early in development as children come to understand and predict the physical world, the living world, and the mental world. We will look at studies that prove they must be reasoning about the hidden properties of objects, living things, and their own minds as well as those of other people. I show that young children are thinking about gravity, DNA, and consciousness – all invisible to the naked eye – and that they do this long before teachers have had a chance to fill their heads with ideas. I show that this way of reasoning is very powerful for children’s understanding, but that it can also let them down, because reasoning this way about the unseen properties of the natural world sometimes leads to supernatural explanations. Children may learn when they grow up that such supernatural notions are wrong, but what if such childish ideas never really go away?