The Psychology of Superstition

"It’s a great book. It’s fairly old now, but a readable introduction to a psychological take on the whole of the paranormal. He takes it away from talking about people’s experiences per se. Randi is looking, for the most part, at people claiming to be psychics. Rather than looking at psychics and mediums, Jahoda looks at our own everyday psychology. Why is it that we touch wood and cross our fingers? Why are we superstitious thinkers? It’s a very early but very important treatise on that topic. To some extent. Certainly there’s some anthropology in there. He talks about the fact that good luck charms have materialised right across the world. The notion of amulets to bring you good fortune appear in pretty much every culture in the world. He argues that there’s something very deep-seated in us that revolves around the notion that we live in a very uncertain world. We’re worried about the future, and anything that can give us some certainty – even in the absence of hard evidence – is a very appealing psychological thought. Thus you get amulets and all sorts of superstitious behaviour. We know that is the case from polls and surveys. As I said at the beginning, more people believe in this stuff in the US than in the UK. And when you go from the West to the East, the numbers tend to be very high. So something is going on culturally. There seems to be some kind of bedrock, something in our brains which tells us this stuff is true and we should believe it. But the exact form it takes is often molded in the culture. If you take sleep paralysis – and the idea that there is an incubus on your chest sucking the life out of you, paralysing you – in some cultures that’s seen as an old hag coming into the room, in other cultures it’s an alien, in some it’s an evil spirit. The experience is the same, but the way it’s interpreted is very different from one culture to another. It is a very scary experience. You can’t move and you may find it difficult to breathe. That alone is terrifying. But once you understand the science of it, it is less scary than thinking there are spirits on you."