I think that it's a side-effect of our inability to distinguish between correlation, and causation. Depending on the personal significance, a causative link can be inferred from a single example.

We want and need ways to improve or affect the chances of things, and predict events. The more significance, the greater the demand. Then there is selection.

Plenty we agree with simply because someone said it confidently, or cleverly.

Some part of us always remains superstitious to some extent, no matter how rational we figure we are. If a loved one convincingly told you they had just seen a ghost, and you completely don't believe in that at all, and tell yourself that you're entirely positive, and that can't be... your heart rate will still increase, and a part of you is still all like "maybe though..."

Well, if the books I read are to be believed, superstition is fallacious thinking specific to causal reasoning. A ''lucky'' shirt, charm, etc. that causes safety, victory, recovery from an illness, etc.

As Wosret it is mistakenly thinking correlation is causation. I think the specific causal fallacy committed is post hoc ergo propter hoc.

However, the underlying assumption in pronouncing such thinking as fallacious is that we've got it right - as in our present scientific knowledge is true. That may be questioned by the astute or foolish - which depends on one's point of view.

It's mimetic - people learning from watching what others do; combined with magical thinking, non-understanding of cause and effect.

A lot of it arises for cultural reasons. I remember reading a book called "Witchcraft And Magic Among The Azande" explaining how witchcraft fulfills certain roles in a tribe. For example, a group is hunting an animal. The first guy to spear the animal kills it, and then the second guy who spears it after it's dead is said to have "also" killed it. This is a superstitious sort of thing to say, but it allows two people to have a co-equal part in downing an animal that the group will eat. So it can be a social thing.

Another example: Joseph Cambell was a mythologist who said something to the effect that shamans and wizards "fight the demons" so the rest of the tribe can fight the world. They're sort of a lightning rod for the psychological tension of the group.

My earlier post may have been too rationalist, or theoretical. I think that there is a domain of experience that isn't subject to categorization, or qualification (the immeasurable). A sense of the unseen, or behind the veil forces that effect our lives, and we need to account for the sensibility of experience at all.

This aspect of our lives requires accounting for, and I think that myths, or whatever "superstitions" persist need to be more than just useful, but true in at least some sense. There has to be something about them that resonates with our experience. It can't be all bluster.

I think that there is a domain of experience that isn't subject to categorization, or qualification (the immeasurable). — Wosret

(Y)

"The idea of trying to explain a [religious] practice seems wrong to me"
"It will never be plausible to say that mankind does all that out of sheer stupidity"
"Error arises only when magic is interpreted scientifically"

Wittgenstein 'Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough'

The first guy to spear the animal kills it, and then the second guy who spears it after it's dead is said to have "also" killed it. This is a superstitious sort of thing to say, but it allows two people to have a co-equal part in downing an animal that the group will eat. So it can be a social thing. — Pneumenon

The law works this way too, if you take part in a murder, you are a murderer. It's association through intent. How is this superstition?

When a group works together, toward an end, and one individual delivers the final act which concludes that end, why is it superstition to say that the success is of the group, rather than of the individual? I think it's just a matter of recognizing the fact that there is more to producing the final outcome, then the straw that broke the camel's back.

Ever since the 1980's there's been a substantial minority of leading stock exchange investors using financial astrology. Amazingly enough, it sometimes seems to work.

What careful studies suggest, however, is that actually 'professional' financial advice on investment is just terrible, so an astute astrologer might well do better. What we believe to be empirically built on reason - and read avidly and often pay for - is no better than a chimp with a marker pen. Read an old 2013 article about it here.

Superstition is the irrational behaviour of Others. I'm just a guy who takes his chances :)

With anything like financial advice, or sports team betting, all they have to beat is chance. A 51% success rate is still making money. What's awful, is that a hell of a lot of them do worse than chance, and you'd make money if you took their advice just to do the opposite.

Like radical relativism, superstition provides us with an implied promise that nothing here on earth is absolute, e.g. we don't have to accept mortality, poverty, inequality etc. as absolute determined facts as long as we can mistrust our intellect, or believe in supernatural intervention. Hence the popularity of superstition (as well as relativism).

There is a broader historical sense of superstition as all types of non-rational, magical-like beliefs - often including religious beliefs that we do not share and do not particularly respect.

There are also more private superstitions that Ann mentioned in the OP, which I would define as personal causal beliefs that are deemed to be both wrong and irrational.

"The idea of trying to explain a [religious] practice seems wrong to me"
"It will never be plausible to say that mankind does all that out of sheer stupidity"
"Error arises only when magic is interpreted scientifically" — Cavacava

I don't agree that it is wrong to explain magical, superstitious and even religious behavior scientifically. Frazer is a dubious and outdated source, but psychology and anthropology (and, more controversially, evo biology and neuroscience) have produced some interesting insights.

Here is a classic Skinner work on the superstitious behavior in... pigeons! (Conducted long before Witty issued his comments.):

In the Summer of 1947, renowned psychiatrist Skinner published his study on a group of pigeons that showed even animals are susceptible to the human condition that is superstition.

Skinner conducted his research on a group of hungry pigeons whose body weights had been reduced to 75% of their normal weight when well-fed. For a few minutes each day, a mechanism fed the birds at regular intervals. What observers of the pigeons found showed the birds developing superstitious behaviour, believing that by acting in a particular way, or committing a certain action, food would arrive.

By the end of the study, three quarters of the birds had become superstitious. One pigeon, in pursuit of food, believed that by turning around in the cage twice or three times between being fed, but not just in any direction; the bird learnt to turn anti-clockwise and appeared to believe that this would mean it being fed. Now, it's easy to dismiss such behaviour as normal - a bird in a cage might be expected to exercise a little. But the other birds developed unique supertitious behaviours in an attempt to gain a meal. Other behaviors the observers discovered include what they described as a 'pendulum' movement of the head, and a regular nodding movement in another bird. — Psychologist World

(Full paper here.)

Kind of reminds me of this documentary I once saw about squirrels. They said that the fuzzies buried like 200k nuts or something crazy, a summer, and wanted to know if they remembered all of the locations. So they put tracking devices in six nuts, let a squirrel bury them, and then caught the squirrel to starve it (because scientists are big on tormenting animals), and then released it. The squirrel dug up all six nuts, and then they were all like, "yup. looks like it remembers where all the nuts are."... the last six is all they showed, not 200k...

Similarly, what does that demonstrate? That it's possible to mistake correlation for causation? Pretty sure we knew that... that birds aren't always right either? Shocking...

It hardly shows anything remotely close to the creation, and persistence of myths through multiple generations...

It demonstrates a basic psychological mechanism that at least partly accounts for the persistence of superstitions (despite it being fairly easy to disprove them with careful observation): confirmation bias, as we like to call it (described in more detail in Skinner's and other behaviourists' theories).

Things are more complicated with humans, I am sure (and probably with animals as well), but that mechanism is still a good first approximation.

How long did the pigeons' superstitions persist? A week? A year? Their whole lives?

From my own experience, people who have superstitious beliefs often call them "traditional", "sacred" or "faith" to cushion the beliefs from rational skepticism.

What is worrisome is just how prevalent this sort of thinking is. Even the things that usually require lots of skepticism, like science, are themselves interpreted superstitiously, i.e. the prophecy that science will deliver us from all woe and evil. It's the 21st century Oracle of Delphi.

Probably the best defense against superstitious beliefs is to constantly go meta and analyze your foundations to make sure you're not making any ridiculous mistakes.

According to classic behaviorist theory, conditioned behavior needs reinforcement, otherwise it is gradually extinguished. Skinner's experiment demonstrated the extinction of pigeons' "superstitious" ticks when the regular stimulus of starvation and feeding that produced them was interrupted. When the stimulus was resumed at a later time, the birds often picked up different superstitions.

Then I just reiterate, that the study doesn't actually demonstrate anything other than that birds can be wrong, and we can trick them.

Other than that, all I see is insinuation.

Whatever, Wosret. It seems that you just aren't interested, which is fine, but you should just acknowledge that, instead of making tendentious statements. I am not saying that Skinner's behaviorism is the be all, end all of all psychology, but it's an influential enough theory to take it seriously.

By the way, no one was "tricking" the birds - the pigeons were fooling themselves all on their own. That was the whole point of the experimental setup: rewards were not correlated to pigeons' behavior in order to reinforce their "superstitions". The setup played the role of blind forces of nature that didn't care about pigeons' little tricks.

Yeah, being in a cage surrounded by intentional agents and artificial equipment, with entirely random food delivery completely beyond your control, and having nothing to do with anything that you do. Just like the wild.

The pigeons were simply bored, being caged, they were finding something to do while they waited for the food to arrive. Notice that the food arrived at regular intervals, so when it came time to be fed, the pigeons got anxious. My dog does that too, but getting all fidgety and barking, does cause me to bring the food quicker.

Well I have always disliked behaviorism, I think behaviorists tend to treat the data as the answer, which seems to be what the behaviorists are trying to do in the case you have cited. If the birds are that hungry, they will try to please in whichever way they recall (if squirrels can remember where they buried 200 nuts...) produced good results last time they were fed, if so. then then the Pigeon's remembered a simple dance step.

It was not superstitious behavior, it was successful behavior.

I am not quite sure what the scientific study of faith would tell us about faith, faith is magical thinking...no?

I don't like animal testing... I have a personal aversion to it. Most of the time, I don't think that it demonstrates much, and is always a fucking horror story, even when it does.

A pigeon or human who is deprived from knowledge of how the food is delivered can only speculate, or test whether the delivery of food might have something to do with their behaviour. Is that superstitious belief? No, it's abductive reasoning.

Superstition does not arise from a lack of knowledge alone but from an indifference to knowledge. Superstition satisfies a will to power over matters of fact.

Usually it takes the truth to fool me.

"We?" Speak for yourself!

And the answer is because people are morons.

Superstition often seems to derive from associations between things in terms of their perceived qualities or even between the names used to refer to the things or their qualities. Names have often been believed to have a magical connection to the essence of the things they refer to. The idea of magical correspondence is at the root of superstition.

Superstition is always based on some conception of causation. The Eastern idea of Karma is a classic example of a magical (non-physical) conception of causation.

How do you differentiate faith in a supernatural being/power or what have you from superstition, both seem to me to be magical ways of thinking.

Superstition = black magic?

We can think rationally about God. This is what theology is all about. Or think of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz , Hegel and the Russian sophiologists. God is not known rationally as a determinate, finite thing; in fact it is just the opposite.

I think superstition arises when the nature of what we might think of as supernatural is believed to be adequately known via the imagination, that is in a determinate way, analogous to how the natural is known.

I've come to the view that magic is real enough, but that it's generally unwise to rely on it.

I have always disliked behaviorism — Cavacava

Me too. The founder of behaviourism, J B Watson, believed that the very notion of 'mind' is itself a superstition. That is an example of the 'superstition of scientisim' in my book.