Superstitions are commonplace in the modern world. Mostly, however, they evoke innocuous images of people reading their horoscopes or avoiding black cats. Certain religious practices might also come ...to mind-praying to St. Christopher or lighting candles for the dead. Benign as they might seem today, such practices were not always perceived that way. In medieval Europe superstitions were considered serious offenses, violations of essential precepts of Christian doctrine or immutable natural laws. But how and why did this come to be? InFearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies, Michael D. Bailey explores the thorny concept of superstition as it was understood and debated in the Middle Ages.
Bailey begins by tracing Christian thinking about superstition from the patristic period through the early and high Middle Ages. He then turns to the later Middle Ages, a period that witnessed an outpouring of writings devoted to superstition-tracts and treatises with titles such asDe superstitionibusandContra vitia superstitionum. Most were written by theologians and other academics based in Europe's universities and courts, men who were increasingly anxious about the proliferation of suspect beliefs and practices, from elite ritual magic to common healing charms, from astrological divination to the observance of signs and omens. As Bailey shows, however, authorities were far more sophisticated in their reasoning than one might suspect, using accusations of superstition in a calculated way to control the boundaries of legitimate religion and acceptable science. This in turn would lay the conceptual groundwork for future discussions of religion, science, and magic in the early modern world. Indeed, by revealing the extent to which early modern thinkers took up old questions about the operation of natural properties and forces using the vocabulary of science rather than of belief, Bailey exposes the powerful but in many ways false dichotomy between the "superstitious" Middle Ages and "rational" European modernity.
Traditionally, research on superstition and magical thinking has focused on people's cognitive shortcomings, but superstitions are not limited to individuals with mental deficits. Even smart, ...educated, emotionally stable adults have superstitions that are not rational. Dual process models-such as the corrective model advocated by Kahneman and Frederick (2002, 2005), which suggests that System 1 generates intuitive answers that may or may not be corrected by System 2-are useful for illustrating why superstitious thinking is widespread, why particular beliefs arise, and why they are maintained even though they are not true. However, to understand why superstitious beliefs are maintained even when people know they are not true requires that the model be refined. It must allow for the possibility that people can recognize-in the moment-that their belief does not make sense, but act on it nevertheless. People can detect an error, but choose not to correct it, a process I refer to as acquiescence. The first part of the article will use a dual process model to understand the psychology underlying magical thinking, highlighting features of System 1 that generate magical intuitions and features of the person or situation that prompt System 2 to correct them. The second part of the article will suggest that we can improve the model by decoupling the detection of errors from their correction and recognizing acquiescence as a possible System 2 response. I suggest that refining the theory will prove useful for understanding phenomena outside of the context of magical thinking.
« Au Moyen Âge, l’Église récupère, transforme et utilise à son profit les données du paganisme et des traditions populaires. » Cette phrase introductrice plante d’emblée le contexte dans lequel ...s’inscrit la problématique, à première vue paradoxale, de cet ouvrage, fruit d’une thèse de doctorat préparée sous la direction du Professeur Claude Lecouteux : ce commentaire du Premier Commandement que fait le clerc Ulrich de Pottenstein, (1360-1417 env.) lui donne en effet l’occasion de pointer les ...
Superstitions are typically seen as inconsequential creations of irrational minds. Nevertheless, many people rely on superstitious thoughts and practices in their daily routines in order to gain good ...luck. To date, little is known about the consequences and potential benefits of such superstitions. The present research closes this gap by demonstrating performance benefits of superstitions and identifying their underlying psychological mechanisms. Specifically, Experiments I through 4 show that activating good-luck-related superstitions via a common saying or action (e.g., "break a leg," keeping one's fingers crossed) or a lucky charm improves subsequent performance in golfing, motor dexterity, memory, and anagram games. Furthermore, Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrate that these performance benefits are produced by changes in perceived self-efficacy. Activating a superstition boosts participants' confidence in mastering upcoming tasks, which in turn improves performance. Finally, Experiment 4 shows that increased task persistence constitutes one means by which self-efficacy, enhanced by superstition, improves performance.
In many places commemorative plaques are erected on buildings to serve as historical markers of notable men and women who lived in them – London has a Blue Plaque scheme for this purpose. We ...investigated the influence of commemorative Blue Plaques on the selling prices of London real estate. We identified properties which sold both before and after a Blue Plaque was installed indexing prices relative to the median prevailing sales prices of properties sold in the same neighborhood. Relative prices increased by 27% (US$165,000 as of July 2020) after a Blue Plaque was installed but not in a control set of properties without Blue Plaques, sold both before and after a Blue Plaque was installed in close proximity. We discuss these findings in relation to the theory of magical contagion and claims from previous research suggesting that people are less likely to acknowledge magical effects when decisions involve money.
•Data on transaction prices of residential properties in London are analyzed.•Properties with commemorative plaques signal the residence of notable individuals.•Transaction prices of properties increase after commemorative plaques are installed.
Superstition as a culture has mythological and historical roots, it is difficult to remove so easily among individuals in society, the aims of this study are to measure the prevalence of ...superstitious thought among students and finding the most important superstitious thought University students According to the variables (gender, place of residence and specialty ) the descriptive method was used to describe superstitious thoughts among university students, the research community is the students of Sulaimani University and (378) students were taken as a sample. the results show that Superstitious thoughts dominate the thinking of university students, Superstitious thoughts are more among female students than male students and I more among students who living in urban areas and It is lower among students in scientific colleges than in medical and humanities colleges.
The associations between cognitive thinking style, religiosity, and superstitious beliefs were presented in the previous research. Still, the role of intrinsic religiosity on the link between ...analytical thinking and belief in superstitions was not examined specifically. In the first study, we explored the intrinsic type of religiosity's moderating role in the association between individuals' analytical thinking tendency and belief in superstitions after controlling for gender, age, education, and political ideology. Findings showed that participants having lower analytical thinking tendencies were more likely to engage beliefs in superstitions. There was no significant relationship between intrinsic religiosity and belief in superstitions. The negative relationship between analytical thinking and belief in superstitions was more evident for participants with a low and moderate intrinsic religiosity degree. In the second study, we primed the participants' analytical thinking tendency and looked into superstitious beliefs. As expected, enhancing analytical thinking led to decreased reporting of superstitious beliefs, but contrary to our hypothesis, the moderating role of intrinsic religiosity was not evident. The present findings were consistent with the idea that analytical thinking tendency would lead people to be less superstitious. Still, the role of intrinsic religiosity needs to be clarified in future research.
•Analytical thinking negatively predicted superstitious beliefs.•Analytic thinking could be primed through a brief session.•Religiosity may moderate the link between analytic thinking and superstitions.
This article focusses on the history of learned magic in late medieval Europe, breaking a period of about 500 years into chronological stages to explore how medieval supporters and critics of magic ...represented the art and responded to each other’s arguments, then reframed their own in a continuous dynamic entanglement. In this period learned magic texts from diverse religious and cosmological traditions (primarily Christian, Jewish, Arabic and Greco-Roman) circulated among people familiar with, and emotionally invested in, a great variety of institutional and informal rituals. Sources reveal a vibrant culture of exchanges of texts between members of religious orders, physicians and lay men, clerics and lay women – a culture of entanglement: discussion, borrowing, critique and adaptation alongside practitioner-client relationships and necessary secrecy and concealment.
Scientific interest in the relationship between analytical thinking and paranormal beliefs has increased in recent times. However, due to cultural differences, research in this area has been limited ...to the consideration of paranormal and religious beliefs. Moreover, few studies have explored the relationship between different types of superstitions and analytical thinking. We hypothesized that analytical thinking promotes distrust of Internet superstition which is a kind of superstition conveyed via the internet and a new form of superstition and that individual differences in the tendency to analytically override initially flawed intuitions are associated with decreased Internet superstition. Participants were classified into an Internet superstition group and a control group. We examined the associations between Internet superstition, traditional superstition, neuroticism, and analytical thinking. We found that analytical thinking negatively predicted both Internet and traditional superstition. Participants who were more willing to engage in analytical thinking were less likely to endorse Internet superstition. Further, Internet superstition has negative relationship with neuroticism.
•This study included the Internet superstition of Koi forwarding.•We found that Internet superstitions are more common among youth.•A positive Internet superstition reduced neuroticism, to a certain extent.•We found that analytic thinking can negatively predict irrational beliefs.•A strong correlation between education, age, and cognitive variables was found.
PDF
