Are you superstitious? If you are how superstitious are you? Good? Bad? Indifferent?

[cheerfulgreek]

This is very interesting. I haven't read all of the posts yet, but there was a Gallup poll that was taken in 2005 that showed 41% of Americans profess belief in ESP. A similar study conducted in 2006 in Poland by the Public Opinion Research Center showed that 30% of Polish citizens claim that star signs affect a person's character. There was also an earlier European study that was done in the UK that said 74% of respondents claimed they knock on wood for good luck. I saw this on the History Channel. They were also talking about how it's related to some kind of evolutionary theory, adaptive traits and stuff like that. There was more, I just can't remember all of it. But I really don't think that different kinds of superstitions need to be explained using just one evolutionary mechanism, it just may be that different kinds of superstititions have different evolutionary explanations, and only some of them may be adaptive. Really though, Who the hell knows?

After watching this, it kind of changed my opinion on this subject slightly. I think that phenomena such as superstition kind of forces us to look at reason from a more consistently scientific point of view. While I think it can be the opposite of reason, on the other hand I also think that it can be looked at as being naturalized similarly to reason. Another possibility that I found to be more persuasive than what the show was saying, was the fact that it could actually be a by-product. What I mean by this is it may not even have any adaptive value in itself, it may just be linked to a trait which may be adaptive. But then again, I may be looking into this too hard.

Oh, and it was also talking about how superstition may be related to cognitive illusions too. It was really good, I enjoyed it. I had been waiting all week long to watch it. It was very interesting. I TiVo'd it.