Superstitions

By: Mike Daniels
​​Have you ever had something that you held on to for good luck, or even strayed away from something for fear of bad luck? Well, that's what we discuss in this week's show, superstitions. But, how did we come up with the idea of superstitions, have they always been part of our inner consciousness or a creation of man to get a better sense of how the world works around us? Seemingly superstitions are our creation, a psychological behavior that we have used for hundreds of years. According to a Gallup poll, more than half of Americans admitted to having some type of superstition. Whether it be a belief in witches, ghosts and haunted houses, all of which have increased over the years due to the popularity of Halloween, Stuart Vyse, PhD, and author of Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition has termed superstitions as magical thinking. But is it magical thinking or are they beliefs and/or rituals that we have adopted into our own personal mythology to make sense of how life works or at least how to get by in life? I think that it is a combination of things. I believe that throughout time humans have come up ways to answer questions that have perplexed us since the beginning of time, and that through observation we have inducted certain beliefs to how the world works. For example, walking under a ladder, one day someone did just that and thus began to have a really bad day afterwards and deduced that walking under that ladder was what caused their bad luck and began to tell everyone that he knew about the correlation of the two thus creating the superstition that walking under a ladder is bad luck. We can see this in almost every superstition that we look at. Are they a deep seeded neurosis that is indicative of greater psychological disorders, I don't think so. Some superstitions may have the appearance of such but there doesn't seem to be any direct correlation between the two. "Most of the superstitions people engage in are perfectly fine, and are not pathological.", says Vyse. So if knocking on wood, carrying a rabbit's foot, or wishing upon a star brings you a calming sense of good luck, then by all means use them as often as you'd like.