Writing Late, Tempting Fate

So . . . yesterday was Friday the 13th, and though I'm a few hours late I thought I would talk about superstitions. As you might have guessed, I'm against them. I know that there are people out there who have specific instructional anecdotes illustrating the value of a particular superstition, but I don't buy it. It seems to me to just be a combination of confirmation bias and narrative fallacy.

(Confirmation bias is the overweighting of supportive evidence; for example, if you believe that Yahoo Serious is a comic genius, you cite the success of Young Einstein and ignore the subsequent failures, or worse yet, claim they are the exceptions that prove the rule. Narrative fallacy is our general bias towards stories and using narrative to make sense of disparate events, thus making them more impactful and memorable. So if you get fired, then get drunk, and then find yourself laughing at a Yahoo Serious movie on at 4 A.M., you may believe the events are related and that a higher power had guided you to comedy gold.)

If you believe in a superstition (e.g. black cat crossing your path equals bad luck, don't walk under a ladder, don't light three cigarettes on one match, etc.), then any time that the superstition is "supported," you have both evidence and a story to tell. Any time it is not supported, you tend not to notice, remember, or accept it.

I can see the logical basis for some superstitions. You shouldn't walk under a ladder because crap can fall on you. You shouldn't light three cigarettes on a match because it raises the probability that you'll get burned. But avoiding the 13th floor? Carrying a lucky charm? Come on.

One of the things that drives my wife nuts is when I'll make a statement like "Wow, the baby is sleeping really well these past few nights," because she believes I am tempting fate and that our good fortune will be reversed. Think about what would be required for that to be a causal chain. Our newborn baby would have to hear and understand what I am saying, and then make the conscious decision to then get upset. Highly unlikely. More likely is that if we've had a run of good luck, it will eventually end (due to random fluctuations and variance), and that we recall the times when "tempting fate" leads to negative outcomes and ignore the times it doesn't.

I've done some research on the topic of tempting fate as well. One of the studies involved priming people with either neutral words or words related to superstition (priming was done by having people do a word completion task, and the words that needed completion either had to do with superstition or not). Just reading and thinking about words that have to do with superstition (e.g. charm, fate, thirteen) caused people to avoid tempting fate (in this case, they said they would buy insurance) much more often than those with the neutral words (e.g. chart, date, twelve). Funnily enough, even though the superstition prime caused people to behave differently, when asked about their beliefs about superstition, the prime had no effect. In other words, people believed that they were not superstitious, but behaved superstitiously.

Anyway, I'm off to walk behind a black cat under a ladder on the thirteenth floor of a building while lighting three cigarettes on one match. While uninsured.