Bruce Hood - The Self Illusion

Superstitious Rituals

Superstitious behaviour also makes some of us feel compelled to do things beyond our control. 26Do you avoid stepping on cracks in the pavement? How about throwing salt over your shoulder if you accidentally spill some? Do you have a lucky charm? These are just some of the superstitious rituals that many of us have. Although we may be aware that these superstitions cannot influence outcomes, many of us feel the need to act them out just in case. Some of these superstitions come from culture, handed down over the years to the extent that we lose the original context in which they first appeared. Most of the important events that punctuate our lives such as births, religious festivals, marriages and times of important change are peppered with old superstitions that have become traditions. In such instances we act them out because that is what is expected.

There is also a whole host of personal superstitious behaviours that many of us entertain. They can take on a degree of compulsiveness that undermines our ability to rein them in with reason. This is because of two mechanisms that operate in our brains. First, our brains have evolved to seek out patterns in the world and attempt to generate explanations for why things happen. Second, in situations where outcomes are important, we get stressed by uncertainty and feel the need to do something so that we have the illusion that we can control events.

We naturally see the world in terms of causes and consequences, so when something happens, we assume that some causal event preceded it and start looking around for suitable candidates. The problem is that we often identify causes that are not responsible. This generates a cognitive illusion known as ‘ post hoc, ergo propter hoc ’, which translates from the Latin as ‘after this, therefore because of this’. It is particularly obvious in superstitious behaviours. In one experiment, participants were presented with a machine that had levers and lights. 27The most important thing about the machine was that it delivered rewards at random intervals. The people taking part in the experiment thought that the machine could be operated to pay out rewards if the correct sequence was discovered. Very soon, individuals were performing elaborate sequences, believing that their actions determined whether the machine paid out or not. One woman thought that jumping up and down on the spot was what triggered the reward. In fact, there was no causal link between their actions and the outcomes.

In real life, the most common examples of superstitious behaviours come from sports and gambling, two activities associated with a lot of random chance and luck. You might have a particularly successful time at the blackjack table. This leads you to try and work out what was unusual about the events leading up to that success so that you can repeat the winning formula. Maybe it was a particular shirt you wore or something that you ate. The next time round you try out the same behaviour again and, if successful, you have the beginnings of a superstitious ritual. When David Beckham played for AC Milan, his fellow teammates developed a superstitious ritual of always patting the England striker on his bottom after scoring a goal for good luck. 28Well, at least that was the reason they gave.

The second reason superstitions form is that they are a means of coping with uncertainty. Superstitions are typically found in situations where there is an element of risk. 29Rituals provide the individual with an illusion of control that they are doing something to influence outcomes when in fact they have no control whatsoever. If you remove an individual’s perception of control, then they experience uncertain situations as stressful, thereby generating anxiety that impairs both the immune system and the capacity to think clearly. 30Enacting superstitious rituals inoculates us from the negative excesses of stress. This is why you often find superstitious behaviour in dangerous occupations. 31

Firemen, pilots, sailors and soldiers hold just some of the jobs that are associated with risk and superstitious rituals. My favourite is the Russian cosmonauts and their pre-launch ritual. Before Charles Simonyi, the billionaire who oversaw the creation of Microsoft Office, hitched a ride on the Soviet rockets that rendezvous with the orbiting international space station, he joined in with his companions’ ritual of urinating on the back wheels of the bus that takes them to the launch pad. 32This superstition originated when Yuri Gagarin was caught short on the first manned space flight and has now become a ritual for all who travel on Russian rockets.

The problem is that, if you consider outcomes as both things that do or do not happen because of some action you did or did not take, then just about everything becomes a candidate for rituals. When these rituals start to rule your life, so that they control your actions, you are entering territory where there is no freedom to choose because your emotions have got the better of your free will.

The Cleaning Lady

Obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) is a loss of self-control and free will that is more disturbing and debilitating than harmless superstitions. I used to drive past an elderly lady on the daily commute to my office in Bristol from my home in the country. Occasionally, I saw her chatting to neighbours but most of the time she was bent over at an alarming angle with her face as close to the ground as possible. At first, I thought she must have dropped something valuable or spotted an extraordinary insect on the sidewalk. What was she looking for I wondered? One day, I slowed the car down enough to discover what she was up to. With delicate precision, she was picking minute particles of debris off the pavement and gathering them into her other free hand. She was cleaning the street outside her house. Sometimes she resorted to using a hand brush and pan, but most of the time she seemed to prefer the meticulous and laborious hand technique.

This old lady had an obsession with dirt. I never talked to her or visited her but I bet my bottom dollar that her house was immaculate. There would not be one thing out of place. Everything would be spotless and in exactly the right place. The towels would be neatly folded, and brand-new soap would be at the side of the hand basin. The toilet paper would be folded at the end and everything would smell of disinfectant. I expect that having achieved a level of unearthly cleanliness within her own domain, she had taken to the street around her house, where the wind and daily passers-by conveniently dropped fragments of debris for her to focus on.

This cleaning lady had the telltale signs of OCD which affects about one in fifty members of the general public. In many instances OCD reflects concerns about the consequences of failing to do something – lock doors or turn off power switches. The most common one that most of us experience is the checking and then rechecking that we have taken our passport when travelling. No matter how many times we confirm that we have it, for reassurance we still feel compelled to check. 33Many of us also have routines that punctuate our daily lives and we prefer not to deviate from them. It might be the way you read the sections of the morning paper in a specific order or how you typically start off your workday. Sometimes these routines become rituals that control and dominate our lives. In one notable case, a British boy with Tourette’s had OCD that compelled him to step correctly on a white road marking. On the morning of 11 September 2001, he neglected to fulfil his compulsion and ended up traumatized because he believed that he was personally responsible for the attacks. 34

The OCD Circuit

The symptoms of OCD are the obsessions (the relentless intrusive thoughts, usually about something bad happening) and the compulsions (the repetitive, ritualistic behaviours often enacted to alleviate the obsessions). 35Karen, a thirty-four-year-old mother of four, used to obsess that some harm would befall her children unless she carried out certain counting rituals. For example, when she smoked and drank coffee, she had to smoke four cigarettes in a row and drink four cups of coffee, otherwise something bad would happen to her children. She knew this was irrational, but if she didn’t perform her counting ritual, she experienced extreme anxiety. 36This sets up a feedback loop in behaviour whereby performing the ritual alleviates the mental anguish and strengthens the grip OCD has over its sufferer.