I’m religious but not generally superstitious and my dad and brother are atheists so it’s interesting how we’ve formed superstitions around ourselves anyways. Maybe it’s because we’re theatre people.
You must follow all theatre superstitions. That’s a given. Don’t say good luck to someone about to do a performance, don’t say Macbeth in a theatre, etc.
But we’ve also got some homegrown ones of our own. For example, don’t eat barbecue pork on election night. If an appliance stops working you need to insult it immediately. If you hope for something you need to knock on your head or it won’t happen.
It’s like how you don’t roll dice when the DM doesn’t tell you to, because you might waste a nat 20.
See as someone who likes statistics I know that’s not a real thing but at the same time I Get It.
I know logically that rubbing the dice between my hands first won’t make it any more likely for me to get the number I need when I’m playing a board game but I’m gonna do it anyways.
I learnt in anthropology class that superstitions form in situations governed by chance or chaotic forces, where humans have low agency to influence the outcome. It has nothing at all to do with religion or spiritual beliefs, it’s just a thing that happens.
Certain professions and activities are prone to superstitions developing for this reason
I wrote a paper last year about maritime superstition and how it’s an early strategy to cope with anxiety in high risk scenarios. The research I saw basically showed that it helped reduced anxiety and improve decision making by giving sailors a feeling of control, making superstitious sailors (typically generational fishermen) safer on board than their newer coworkers.
Newer fishermen were more likely to work on larger scale vessels than generational fishermen, where they have less control over operational decisions as well which was more likely to contribute to a feeling of helplessness > higher anxiety > no coping strategies > poor operational decision making.
Essentially the old timers on their old boats with their arbitrary rules about whistling kinda made their own safety with that coping strategy.
Anyway shout out John J. Poggie.
skinner did a study that found that pigeons also develop arbitrary, ritualistic behaviors that seem to be analogous to superstition. the animals in the study that were fed at random times developed odd movements compared to animals fed at regular times, and when hungry or impatient the animals would perform the odd movements repeatedly, as though to trigger the feeding they wanted. even though the feeding time never stopped being random.
Are there additional animal studies about superstitions?
The evolution of superstitious and superstition-like behaviour - PMC
This is why ER staff and labor & delivery staff are the most superstitious medical people, because they have the least control over what happens on their shift
Since I’ve been working overnights in a hospital pharmacy near the ER, where the traffic varies a whole lot, and the times it gets busy can seem to come randomly out of nowhere…
…and where during those busy times I am often at the mercy of very finicky computers, which are also reporting decisions to me from very finicky external systems (f'kin health insurance)…
I gotta admit, superstitions feel viscerally real to me lately.
even though I still don’t believe in any actual supernatural mechanism that could cause things to work that way.
and even though I’m pretty sure that my observation of things working that way is just due to selective memory, my mind grasping at straws to see patterns because otherwise I just feel lost.
even if it’s totally an illusion, like those printed patterns that seem to move, or those squares that look different colors because of their surroundings– it’s still a damn convincing one.
like. I do not think there is any actual statistical reason to expect that after hours of things being slow, the rush of busyness will always immediately start the exact moment you begin a project that would make such a rush of busyness extremely inconvenient.
but there’s only so many times it can happen exactly like that before it starts feeling like the truth.
and I do not actually think that computers (or insurance companies they connect to) can read my mind, or respond to incantations murmured under my breath.
but damn if the little I/O Tower Prayer from TRON (1982) doesn’t actually seem to work, a lot of the time.
if you’re at my counter waiting for me to run your credit card or submit your insurance info, and you see me close my eyes and fold my hands a certain way and move my lips to the shape of mysterious words– the words are “all that is visible must grow beyond itself and extend into the realm of the invisible.” and I’m doing it for you.
and no I don’t f'king think the Programs actually hear me. but I’ve got pretty damn limited other options, okay.