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posted by mrpg on Friday April 19 2019, @09:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the thank-god(s)-for-science! dept.

Even seemingly irrational beliefs can become ensconced in the social norms of a society. Research by biologists in the School of Arts and Sciences shows how.

Ancient Roman leaders once made decisions about important events, such as when to hold elections or where to build new cities, based on the presence or flight patterns of birds. Builders often omit the thirteenth floor from their floor plans, and many pedestrians go well out of their way to avoid walking under a ladder.

While it's widely recognized that superstitions like these are not rational, many persist, guiding the behavior of large groups of people even today.

In a new analysis driven by game theory, two theoretical biologists devised a model that shows how superstitious beliefs can become established in a society's social norms. Their work, which appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates how groups of individuals, each starting with distinct belief systems, can evolve a coordinated set of behaviors that are enforced by a set of consistent social norms.

How superstitions spread


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  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Friday April 19 2019, @09:27AM (11 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Friday April 19 2019, @09:27AM (#832090) Journal

    Superstition is just a sensible strategy whenever you haven't got sufficient data for other kinds of analysis. Little timmy put his finger on the exposed wire and cried? better not do it myself thinks little tommy.

    Sure, science can debunk superstitions. Not by analysis, because it is difficult to claim you took into consideration all factors (the smug proponents of the mechanical universe model, that still need to come to terms with quantum scale phenomenons, should be a warning). But using stats, you can. If the superstition involves X causing Y all you need is enough daredevils to document X and not Y for some p>.5, the end.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday April 19 2019, @01:50PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Friday April 19 2019, @01:50PM (#832142)

    You were right on, until you got to the p>.5 bit, which is actually a sort of superstition among scientists who tend to deeply misunderstand the actual meaning and significance of p-values.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by ledow on Friday April 19 2019, @02:22PM (7 children)

    by ledow (5567) on Friday April 19 2019, @02:22PM (#832155) Homepage

    "Timmy put his finger here and got hurt" isn't a superstition. It's an inference from a single fact. A not-unreasonable one, especially if then Timmy tells you what happened and you can infer the cause.

    Superstition is being exposed to lots of facts, discarding almost all of them for no particularly good reason, and then focusing on one tiny fact out of that mess, extrapolating it into the whole of reality.

    Now a literal example: Supersitition is a pigeon tapping its head on glass because the last time it tapped its head on glass, it was fed. It doesn't realise that it was fed entirely at random times, it just happened to be tapping its head at the time. And it continue to tap its head, over and over and over and over again without result, but still associates tapping its head with feeding because - eventually - it will be fed again soon after it taps its head and then conveniently ignores those over 999 times it didn't work.

    Your favourite football teams and lucky pants (because they scored last time you wore them).

    Superstition is not a sensible or logical strategy. Not touching the hurty-wire is.

    Superstition is a social construct, much like lying, designed to discard the truth in order to fit in. Everything from horoscopes to touching-wood, not-stepping-on-the-cracks to not-eating-before-swimming, gambling fallacies to not-opening-umbrellas-indoors.

    The logic has been sucked out of the process, methodically and deliberately, to enable conformance. In some cases there was never any truth whatsoever, in others the truth is so corrupted that it's no longer true in the forms stated ("I before E, except after C", for example).

    A superstition, almost by definition, is *not* logical. It's the absolute opposite of that. It may be sensible to not touch the wire that hurt Timmy, but if we stuck to that superstition, nobody, ever, anywhere, at all would ever touch a wire again (not unlike things like "5G-frying-your-brain" and so on).

    Superstition isn't sensible, logical or even useful. It's just something for people who don't have any useful knowledge or insight, and a wholesale regard for disinterest and ignorance, to say.

    I honestly cringe every damn time someone adult says "touch wood for luck", or "cross my fingers", or "But I'm an Aries", or "I carry this crystal", or "throws salt over their shoulder", or whatever other absolute drivel they have heard and just repeat. And it's *not* a harmless venture. It really isn't. Perpetuating such nonsense only makes it worse. It becomes a collective celebration of ignorance that our children overhear and copy.

    "Don't read in the car, it'll make you feel sick", my mother tried to tell my daughter. No, mum, you know why that makes *you* feel sick? Because *someone told you that*. Fortunately, my daughter was not only well-prepared (having read in the car all her life, and having a reading-age far in excess of her years), but had already been told by other family members that it was nonsense.

    Superstitions spread because the ignorant parrot everything they are told unquestioningly and then use that as a social cue in the absence of anything productive to say. It's a oral tradition of smalltalk nonsense.

    Excuse me, I have mirrors to go break over black cats walking under a ladder.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @04:31PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @04:31PM (#832198)

      > "Don't read in the car, it'll make you feel sick", ...

      As far as I can remember, no one told me this as a kid, I learned it from experience, and it's still true in certain circumstances. I have a mild case--looking out the front window to see where the car is headed usually clears it up in a few minutes. Ymmv.

    • (Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Friday April 19 2019, @04:53PM

      by Osamabobama (5842) on Friday April 19 2019, @04:53PM (#832204)

      "Don't read in the car, it'll make you feel sick", my mother tried to tell my daughter.

      "No, grandma, I only get car sick when you drive like an asshole."

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    • (Score: 2) by Nuke on Friday April 19 2019, @05:46PM

      by Nuke (3162) on Friday April 19 2019, @05:46PM (#832222)

      With you until you said reading in cars makes you sick was a superstition. Maybe it does not make everyone sick, but it certainly does some. Looking out at the landscape gives the brain a recognisable fixed reference with which to counteract the feeling of motion. It is similar on a ship - if you are feeling seasick in your cabin, go out on deck and look at the horizon to give your brain a reference plane.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 19 2019, @10:50PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 19 2019, @10:50PM (#832349) Journal

      "Don't read in the car, it'll make you feel sick", my mother tried to tell my daughter. No, mum, you know why that makes *you* feel sick? Because *someone told you that*. Fortunately, my daughter was not only well-prepared (having read in the car all her life, and having a reading-age far in excess of her years), but had already been told by other family members that it was nonsense.

      Motion sickness happens. Some people are near immune to it and others can't ride in a back seat for long periods of time without hurling, book or no book. What's going on, which is a typical source of superstition, is that someone generalized from their experience to another person. If Mom gets motion sickness, reading in the back seat of a car, then daughter must too.

    • (Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Friday April 19 2019, @11:14PM

      by Magic Oddball (3847) on Friday April 19 2019, @11:14PM (#832359) Journal

      Many (if not most) cultural superstitions are the result of a behavioral sequence occurring often enough to forge a powerful aversive emotional reaction, whether the original population involved knew intellectually it was a case of correlation-not-causation or knew there really was a causative effect but lacked the knowledge to explain it. So the first generation might have naturally avoided the behavior as it reminded them of horrible things that had happened, but then taught it as a blanket rule to their children at a young enough age that the "rule" became ingrained emotionally without the underlying logic.

      The two that come to my mind immediately from my childhood were to never place a hat upon a bed or footwear on the table as either behavior would be followed by a death in the family. The 'footwear' superstition almost certainly has its roots in historic hygiene: people knew that potentially-fatal illnesses occurred after shoes were placed on an eating surface, but were unaware it was caused by the wide variety of fecal bacteria they would've picked up by walking in areas where animal & human waste was common.

      The 'hat' rule, meanwhile, would've started as an emotional aversion. Back when people commonly died at home, Catholics would have the priest perform the Last Rites in the final days/hours; since houses were fairly small, the priest often would come into the room and place his hat upon the nearest flat surface (the bed) in order to don his vestments. That could've created a typical Pavlovian reaction: someone sees a hat upon the bed right before a death often enough, and would react in the future by feeling either grief or anxiety.

      Neither case is a matter of lying, deliberately ignoring facts, or similar; it's a built-in fundamental level of psychology that can be observed in all mammals, as it greatly improved the animal's chance of surviving long enough to pass its genes on to the next generation. Having a complex brain that is capable of rational thought doesn't change that; we can intentionally use it to mitigate it (e.g. to combat phobias that interfere with daily life or personal goals) but that doesn't change how our brains are wired.

    • (Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday April 20 2019, @08:27AM

      by Bot (3902) on Saturday April 20 2019, @08:27AM (#832482) Journal

      > "Timmy put his finger here and got hurt" isn't a superstition. It's an inference from a single fact.

      > Supersitition is a pigeon tapping its head on glass because the last time it tapped its head on glass, it was fed.

      You adopt a god POV, you shouldn't use a definition of superstition that requires you to know that "touch wire, feel bad" is inference done right and "tap head, get food" is inference done wrong. because then the definition is post facto. "Oh, looks like I find no possible correlation between action and effect, therefore it is superstition". What if one day the pigeon feeder hears the tapping and says huh maybe he wants food. Ceased to be a superstition then.

      If you adopt the point of view of timmy and the pigeon there is no whatsoever difference between what you defined as superstition and what you defined as inference. Personally I prefer to deal with a superstitious guy that counteracts before having worked out all the implications than a hollywood hero kind of guy who acts according to his necessarily limited mental models proving the establishment was wrong, especially when the superstitious guy is aware he is superstitious while the hero thinks he can always rationalize well enough to make the right choice.

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    • (Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday April 20 2019, @12:46PM

      by driverless (4770) on Saturday April 20 2019, @12:46PM (#832536)

      Superstition is being exposed to lots of facts, discarding almost all of them for no particularly good reason, and then focusing on one tiny fact out of that mess, extrapolating it into the whole of reality.

      Absolutely! Was just going to type a longer post about silly superstitions but I need to reboot to install an update, hang on...

      sync; sync; sync; reboot now

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @07:15PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @07:15PM (#832253)

    do you mind speed up the training of your NN model? it's kind of boring to watch these barely related comments