Are you spooked by the appearance of black cats? Do you court disaster by walking under ladders of on cracks in the pavements?
There was a fascinating piece of research reported in the New Scientist recently which attempts to give an evolutionary explanation for the existence of superstitions. Natural selection might explain why people sometimes believe such bizarre things. There could be a benefit to such beliefs.
Belief in a superstition is a tendency to falsely link a cause with an effect. We have a tendency to see imaginary connections between events - a by-product of the vital ability to discern patterns in the world. We have a disposition to overestimate the improbability of certain events. However, although the link that we create may be false, there can occasionally be rewards for believing such errors.
For instance, Kevin Foster, evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, argues that a prehistoric human might associate rustling grass with the approach of a predator and hide. Most of the time, the wind will have caused the sound, but a belief that rustling grass is dangerous can be helpful on some occasions. If a group of lions is coming there’s a huge benefit to not being around.
Foster and his associate Hannah Kokko found that as long as the cost of believing a superstition is less than the cost of being hurt by not believing it, superstitions will persist. In general, people must balance the cost of being right with the cost of being wrong, Foster says. Throw in the chances that a real lion, and not wind, makes the rustling sound, and you can predict superstitious beliefs.
Such willingness to believe in a false link that occasionally appears to exist may explain the continued belief in alternative and homeopathic remedies. The chances are that most of them don’t do anything, but some of them occasionally appear to work, and this reinforces the supposed link between cause and effect.
In a pre-scientific age it is understandable that people held onto beliefs that would appear to be efficacious in guaranteeing continued existence in a blissful afterlife. What may have started off as superstition became enshrined in culture. Depending on where you were born, you had your chosen religious belief system selected for you, handed down by our family, and often enforced by the state (with violence if necessary - for your own good, of course). The possibility of real hell fire would be enough to get you to believe any link between what the religion taught and what might happen to you.
Now we are better at questioning the reality of supposed links between cause and effect. What real evidence is there (apart from hearsay, tradition, myth, and wishful thinking) of the existence of hell and an afterlife? Yet the superstitions persist because the cultural presence is strong and the fears run deep in the collective psyche.
At present, however, it is questionable whether the former “better safe than sorry” religious strategy is still beneficial - with such beliefs proving to be very costly in holding back individual development and societal change. Fundamentalist religion held back learning for thousands of years in Europe before the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment broke the hegemony of the church. This religious superstition has put the lid on former learning in Arab countries.
If fundamentalism continues to rise in Europe and America, the superstitious Dark Ages may try to creep back almost unnoticed. Already there are a few science teachers in the UK and US who believe that the earth is less than 10,000 years old and that there is no evidence for evolution. In my view this slow creep of superstition must not be allowed to happen. Believing that black is white and that two plus two equals five is ultimately too costly for everybody. Belief in the false reality links no longer has any significant value for us.
I have never understood superstition or beliefs held without any evidence to support them. Not sure if that is my mathematical nature or just me being perverse. I don’t think I hold any superstitious beliefs at all - none I can think of (but then I am very forgetful).
I do think though, that the more complex life becomes, the more information there is out there to believe or not believe, there is an instinct to hide, to dive back in a cave and just to want to have faith in things without having to check them out. Just so long as people don’t take a copy of The Daily Mail or a religious pamphlet into their cave with them, I guess it might be OK.
Critical thinking must be taught in schools. Children should be taught to question everything. Superstition creeps in because of the biblical concept of blind obedience to parents, and due to the natural phenomenon of the early childhood belief that our parents are “god.”
Coming from a superstitious culture, I know that I never questioned many things Mom said, until recently. We have it deeply ingrained in our heads that if Mom/Dad says it, it must be true.
Mom told stories of a white creature who joined her when she walked on lonely country roads at night, and I believed her. In my forties, when I thought of the stories again, I realized that the stories just proved to me, once again, what kind of liar she is.
We need teach children to question everything regardless of the source, and to look for rational explanations for even menial daily life events. If we do that, we could eventually beat superstition.
As you say, the fact that a trait has evolved doesn’t mean that it will continue to be useful for ever: most species show evidence of having taken on and discarded traits during their evolution.
In the modern world, we are bombarded with a mass of information, much of which we do not understand but about which we have to make choices. It is unsurprising if we often use “unscientific” methods of choosing such as flipping a coin or following an old superstition. Where there is ignorance and fear, superstition and gurus thrive.
Here is a different thought. Many people believe (and your post seems to suggest it) that religion is enjoying a resurgence. Yet A.C. Grayling among others is insistent that this is not so and that it is merely the fact the religions have become more vociferous and are attracting greater attention (and influence) than is justified by their numbers.
If Grayling et al are right, could it be that what is happening is that we are approaching the final showdown between religious obscurantism and rational enlightenment? I hope so, because the religious are bound to lose the fight and it is time we ended the nonsense once and for all.