After showing that Blackadder clip a couple of days ago, YouTube (as is its wont) promoted another funny scene from the same show, this time about a famous theater superstition involving the play Macbeth.
Superstitions are strange things. They exercise considerable power over people. At a party recently, I happened to mention that we had had a relatively mild winter and a friend, a physician and thus having some scientific training, upbraided me for possibly jinxing things and bringing on a storm.
The fact that nothing of the sort happened due to my tempting of the weather gods did not faze her in the least. A few weeks later, at a function at her place, she was telling her parish priest who was there (she is a devout Roman Catholic) that she has observed that the winter storm patterns seem to be avoiding the Cleveland area and she put this down to her prayers to St. Joseph. The fact that her prayers were inconveniencing people elsewhere did not seem to strike her.
Did you try saying “Macbeth”?
Well, religion is basically superstition writ large. I don’t really see the difference.
I’ve always wondered how the religious manage to maintain contradictory models of how the universe works. If she does that again, maybe you could ask her: “How exactly does this ‘jinx’ work? God, according to you, knows all. So you think that he wasn’t going to cause trouble locally before I spoke, but having heard me, is going to suddenly change his mind and cause bad weather, simply because I spoke? You really think that God is that petty?” Or something like that.
I suspect she may abandon the conversation if you do that, but maybe she’ll come up with an amusing or interesting response.
Why does the all-knowing and all-powerful ruler of the universe need staff?
I got my Ph.D. at a school which also had an M.D. program. We physiology students took many classes with the med students. Some of them were brilliant, but many seemed quite average, and they certainly weren’t the most intellectual of people.
Or maybe an inverse of what I wrote before: “So you’re sure that God was absolutely determined to send storms to Cleveland, but each time St. Joseph comes running in, going on and on about this one person praying to him for no storms, and God shrugs and changes his mind and sends the storms around Cleveland to inconvenience people who hadn’t prayed to St. Joseph? You really think that God is so easy to manipulate, as well as being so petty?”
I think that many people entertain superstition in a way similar to the way they entertain the belief ibn Santa and the Easter Bunny: They know it’s not real, but it’s fun to play along.
But I also know that many people believe a lot of bullshit, especially when it comes to medicine and religion.
I remember reading elsewhere (and feel free to take this with a grain of salt) that some scientists studying pigeon behavior once decided to see what would happen if the relationship between pecking on the buttons and releasing the food were made entirely random.
The result was the pigeons developing the equivalent of superstitions. ‘Well, last time I had to turn around twice before pecking this button to get food, so I’ll turn around some more before pecking…’ It’s that combination of seeing patterns (even if there aren’t any) and confirmation bias that leads to superstitions persisting because the random data matches up just often enough.
(In the case of Macbeth, from some of my friends who were in theatre, it is actually one of the more difficult of Shakespeare’s plays to stage and perform properly. After seeing many productions fail through what was obviously no fault of theirs, it’s not surprising that performers started getting superstitious about the play.)
Jenora @#7,
The experiment you cite is a famous one done by B. F. Skinner..