Superstition

Clay hamsa on a wall, believed to protect the inhabitants of the house from harm

Superstition is a credulous belief or notion, not based on reason or knowledge. The word is often used pejoratively to refer to folk beliefs deemed irrational. This leads to some superstitions being called "old wives' tales". It is also commonly applied to beliefs and practices surrounding luck, prophecy and spiritual beings, particularly the irrational belief that future events can be foretold by specific unrelated prior events.

The etymology is from the classical Latin superstitio, literally "a standing over [in amazement]", but other interpretations include an over-scrupulousness in religion or a "hold-over" from older beliefs .[1] The word is attested in the 1st century BC, notably in Livy and Ovid, in the meaning of an unreasonable or excessive belief in fear or magic, especially foreign or fantastical ideas. Cicero, however, derives the term from the "superstitiosi" ("survivors"): parents indulging in excessive prayer and sacrifice hoping that their children would survive them to perform their necessary funeral rituals.[2] By the 1st century AD, it came to refer to "religious awe, sanctity; a religious rite" more generally.[3][4]

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Superstition and folklore

To European medieval scholars the word was applied to any beliefs outside of or in opposition to Christianity; today it is applied to conceptions without foundation in, or in contravention of, scientific and logical knowledge.[5] Many extant western superstitions are said to have originated during the plagues that swept through Europe.

Superstition and religion

In keeping with the Latin etymology of the word, religious believers have often seen other religions as superstition. Likewise, atheists and agnostics may regard any religious belief as superstition.

Religious practices are superstitious when they include belief in miracles, an afterlife, supernatural interventions, apparitions or the efficacy of prayer, charms, incantations, the meaningfulness of omens, and prognostications.

Greek and Roman pagans, who modeled their relations with the gods on political and social terms, scorned the man who constantly trembled with fear at the thought of the gods, as a slave feared a cruel and capricious master. Such fear of the gods (deisidaimonia) was what the Romans meant by "superstition" (Veyne 1987, p. 211). For some Christians, just such fears might be worn proudly as a name: Desdemona.

The Roman Catholic Church considers superstition to be sinful in the sense that it denotes a lack of trust in the divine providence of God and, as such, is a violation of the first of the Ten Commandments. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states superstition "in some sense represents a perverse excess of religion" (para. #2110).

The Catechism clearly dispels commonly held preconceptions or misunderstandings about Catholic doctrine relating to superstitious practices:

Superstition is a deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand is to fall into superstition. Cf. Matthew 23:16–22 (para. #2111)

Some superstitions originated as religious practices that continued to be observed by people who no longer adhere to the religion that gave birth to the practice. Often the practices lost their original meaning in this process. In other cases, the practices are adapted to the current religion of the practitioner. As an example, during the Christianizing of Europe, pagan symbols to ward off evil were replaced with the Christian cross.

Superstition and psychology

In 1948, behavioural psychologist B.F. Skinner published an article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, in which he described his pigeons exhibiting what appeared to be superstitious behaviour. One pigeon was making turns in its cage, another would swing its head in a pendulum motion, while others also displayed a variety of other behaviours. Because these behaviours were all done ritualistically in an attempt to receive food from a dispenser, even though the dispenser had already been programmed to release food at set time intervals regardless of the pigeons' actions, Skinner believed that the pigeons were trying to influence their feeding schedule by performing these actions. He then extended this as a proposition regarding the nature of superstitious behaviour in humans.[6]

Skinner's theory regarding superstition being the nature of the pigeons' behaviour has been challenged by other psychologists such as Staddon and Simmelhag, who theorised an alternative explanation for the pigeons' behaviour.[7]

Despite challenges to Skinner's interpretation of the root of his pigeons' superstitious behaviour, his conception of the reinforcement schedule has been used to explain superstitious behaviour in humans. Originally, in Skinner's animal research, "some pigeons responded up to 10,000 times without reinforcement when they had originally been conditioned on an intermittent reinforcement basis."[8] Compared to the other reinforcement schedules (e.g. fixed ratio, fixed interval), these behaviours were also the most resistant to extinction.[8] This is called the partial reinforcement effect, and this has been used to explain superstitious behaviour in humans. To be more precise, this effect means that, whenever an individual performs an action expecting a reinforcement, and none seems forthcoming, it actually creates a sense of persistence within the individual.[9] This strongly parallels superstitious behaviour in humans because the individual feels that, by continuing this action, reinforcement will happen; or that reinforcement has come at certain times in the past as a result of this action, although not all the time, but this may be one of those times.

From a simpler perspective, natural selection will tend to reinforce a tendency to generate weak associations. If there is a strong survival advantage to making correct associations, then this will outweigh the negatives of making many incorrect, "superstitious" associations.[10]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Oxford English Dictionary (Second ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. 1989. "The etymological meaning of L. superstitio is perhaps ‘standing over a thing in amazement or awe’. Other interpretations of the literal meaning have been proposed, e.g. ‘excess in devotion, over-scrupulousness or over-ceremoniousness in religion’ and ‘the survival of old religious habits in the midst of a new order of things’; but such ideas are foreign to ancient Roman thought." 
  2. ↑ Cicero, De Natura Deorum II, 28 (32), quoted in Wagenvoort, Hendrik (1980). Pietas: selected studies in Roman religion. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. p. 236. ISBN 9789004061958. 
  3. ↑ Oxford Latin Dictionary. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. 1982. 
  4. ↑ Turcan, Robert (1996). The Cults of the Roman Empire. Nevill, Antonia (trans.). Oxford, England: Blackwell. pp. 10–12. ISBN 0631200479. 
  5. ↑ Jolly, raylene seaton; Raudvere, Catharina & Peters, Edward (2001) Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Middle Ages. Continuum International Publishing Group. p. x.
  6. ↑ Skinner, B.F. (1948). 'Superstition' in the Pigeon. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38(2), 168-172.
  7. ↑ Staddon, J.E., & Simmelhag, V.L. (1971). The 'supersitition' experiment: A reexamination of its implications for the principles of adaptive behaviour. Psychological Review, 78(1), 3-43.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Schultz & Schultz (2004, 238).
  9. ↑ Carver & Scheier (2004, 332).
  10. ↑ Kevin R. Foster; Hanna Kokko (2009). "The evolution of superstitious and superstition-like behaviour". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 276 (1654): 31. doi:10.1098/rspb.2008.0981. PMID 18782752. PMC 2615824. http://journals.royalsociety.org/content/v61648mh87863528. 

Further reading