by sumbul syedHave you ever changed your path after seeing a black cat crossing the road? Do you always wear a set pair of jeans while going for an exam? Superstitions surround human beings. We are wired with magical thinking. But before we explore more, it’s essential to understand what ‘superstitions’ are. Superstitions are a result of falsely associating a cause to an effect. Suppose yesterday you wore a black pair of jeans and aced your exam. You may want to wear it for your next test for good luck, and end up thinking it wasn’t your hard work but wearing the jeans what helped you get a good grade. Superstitions make sense from an evolutionary point of view. Our ancestors had to look out for predators constantly. Even the slightest sound of grass rustling cried for their attention as it could have meant the enemy was waiting to strike. Or it could have been only the breeze that was causing the grass to rustle. However, pre-historic humans could not take the chance and would flee. Moreover, if rustling sounds were mostly heard during a particular event, say a full moon our ancestors would make false associations without any evidence and think it was the full moon causing dangerous predators to approach them. The human brain wants to make sense of everything. Even if something is illogical and makes little sense our brain nevertheless tries to connect the dots. That is how superstitions are born. Burrhus Frederick Skinner, most popularly known as B F Skinner, was one of the most influential psychologists of all time. Skinner conducted a very crucial experiment on pigeons. He put pigeons inside an apparatus where food came in at random. Skinner expected pigeons to sit and wait. But that is not what happened. He saw that pigeons learned ´superstitious ‘behaviours or simply put, unusual behaviours, like twirling around in circles and pecking in the corner. Why did it happen? Pigeons were under the impression that their unusual behaviors were causing the food to arrive when, in reality, the food arrival was completely random. It was a mere coincidence that the food came when they were exhibiting one of the erratic behaviors. Science has revolutionized the entire human civilization. It has helped send people to space, eradicate life-threatening diseases like smallpox, invent computers that can perform trillions of calculations in seconds. The pandemic is a good examples of science’s progress; coming up with vaccines so fast. Yet, people all over the world do not want to overcome their superstitions. In “Enemies of Reason”, a documentary hosted by Evolutionary Biologist Richard Dawkins different pseudoscientific techniques are talked about. Dowsing is one of these techniques. To show that dowsing has no scientific explanation, a double-blind study was conducted in the documentary, which presented that the participants were merely doing the guesswork and were majorly wrong in locating water inside the boxes. However, their faith in dowsing was concrete and despite of having clear evidences they were still in a state of denial. Science is always open to new possibilities. It tests those possibilities by coming up with hypotheses, putting those hypotheses under rigorous scientific methods and making conclusions. It rejects dogmas after conducting carefully designed experiments. Yet we still have a hard time seeing our pre-conceived notions challenged in front of us. Beliefs are not easy to change. Sometimes there are beliefs that do no good to us neither as individuals nor as a society. Such beliefs only cloud our rationality and reason. There may be many things that remain unexplained. However, that doesn’t mean they can ‘never’ be explained. Science is the best tool we have to explain the world around us. And we will never make full progress until we start putting our faith in science. References
British Documentaries. (2017, March 10). Richard Dawkins Enemies of Reason Part 1 Slave to Superstition [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcd4eFBFG3M Ronca, D. (2015, July 1). Did we evolve to be superstitious?. How Stuff Works. https://people.howstuffworks.com/did-evolve-to-be-superstitious.htm The Pantheion. (2009, March 4). Superstitious Behaviour- Pigeon Reward [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XbH78wscGw
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