Superstitious thinking trap
As a young Baseball pitcher, I found life on the diamond a breeding ground for superstition – lucky numbers, pregame rituals, Baseball gods, etc. But superstition exceeds far beyond the outfield fence, ranging from gambling halls to alternative medicine. So I ask the question – can we bend this world to our gain, or is it just another fallacy? Enter Skinner.
In 1948, B.F Skinner put hungry pigeons into glass boxes, equipped with automatic feeders that dispensed food pellets. Interestingly, our feathered friends developed rituals that earned them pellets of food!
- repetitive pecking on the wall & floor
- systematic head bobbing
- spinning in specific numbers
- hopping on one leg
How did their rituals control the outcome?! Well, they didn’t…
It was superstition. The pigeons developed what they thought was a correct ritual to earn food. In truth, their actions were arbitrary because the machine dispensed food at 15 second intervals! So when a pigeons action inevitably matched-up with the dispensement of food, it wrongly linked cause & effect. The birds developed a false belief that they had control of their surroundings – albeit a tiny glass box.
Before you start giggling and calling our feathered friends stupid, disease ridden aviators, I want to introduce someone to you. Enter Koichi Ono.
Koichi developed a similar experiment with humans, wherein he crammed us into similar pigeon boxes…(not true) He actually sat participants down at a desk with 3 colored levers along with an electronic score board. Their task was to rack up as many points as possible, but were NOT told how! Unknown to the subjects, the score board was rigged to award points at random; it wasn’t even hooked up to the levers. But because participants were eager to win, they became creative in attempts to earn more points, and developed strong beliefs in their methods; Just like our friendly fat rat fliers!
- simple lever pulling variations
- complicated mathematical formulas in lever pulling
- knocking on table with intermittent lever pulling
- even jumping out of chairs to touch ceiling, mixed with lever pulls
Once a few coincidental patterns of “cause and effect“ emerged, they were hooked! Even when their actions failed to earn points, they persisted with conviction. The same reason a team mate of mine didn’t wash his jock jock strap after a good game. The way he saw it, genital sweat meant more strike outs.
What I find particularly interesting about superstition, is how we ignore negative results. We never take a step back and look at the situation objectively. We note success and ignore failure. We take the herbal remedy near the end of a cold, and link new found health to an effective cure, leading to bad decisions regarding science and medicine for our future well being.
Our very useful and effective survival mechanism for picking up patterns, turns to pigeon poo when it comes to coincidence and chance. We are thrown into skinners box, left pecking at the walls and spinning in the random world around us. Something to think about.
