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and to try to accumulate as many points as possible on a counter. Whenever the subject gained a point a green light flashed. A red light indicated that the session was over, which was when the subject reached one hundred points. Unbeknownst to the subjects, only the right button could generate points, and those points were delivered on a VI schedule of reinforcement, with an average time between point delivery of thirty seconds. The results were revealing in that human brains are no less superstitious than bird brains: most of the subjects quickly developed superstitious button-pushing patterns between the left and right buttons, because if they pressed the left button just before the right button happened to deliver a point, that particular pattern was reinforced. Once subjects established a superstitious button-pushing pattern, they stuck with that pattern throughout the session because they continued to be reinforced for it.

To extinguish the Type I false-positive pattern, Catania and Cutts introduced what is called a changeover delay (COD), which added a period of time between presses on the left button and subsequent reinforced presses on the right button, thereby untangling them from any meaningful pattern. That is, where (A) the left button was incorrectly associated with (B) a point, a superstitious pattern was established; but by separating A and B in time the association link was disconnected. As you might expect (and certainly hope), humans needed a longer COD than pigeons because, presumably, we have a greater cognitive capacity for holding associations in memory than birds do. But this is a double-edged sword. Our greater capacity for learning is often offset by our greater capacity for magical thinking. Superstition in pigeons can be easily extinguished; in humans it is much more difficult.7

Hardwired Patternicity

Patternicity is common across the animal kingdom. Early studies in the 1950s by Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, who pioneered the study of ethology—the evolutionary origins of animal behavior—demonstrated the capacity of many organisms to rapidly form lasting patterns. Lorenz, for example, documented imprinting, a type of phase-dependent learning whereby the youth of a species at a critical period in their development will form a fixed and lasting pattern of memory for whoever or whatever appears before them during that brief span of time. In the baby greylag geese that Lorenz studied, for example, the object of gaze in the critical period of thirteen to sixteen hours old is normally a mother, and thus she becomes imprinted in their brains. To test this hypothesis, the mischievous Lorenz made certain that it was he who was in the ducklings’ visual field at the critical moment, and thereafter “momma” Konrad led his flock around the grounds of his research station.8

A form of reverse imprinting can be found in humans in the incest taboo. Two people growing up in close proximity to each other during a critical period in childhood are unlikely to find each other sexually attractive as adults. Evolution has programmed within us a rule of thumb: don’t mate with those with whom you’ve grown up because they are very likely your siblings and are thus too genetically similar.9 Again, we don’t make genetic calculations. Natural selection did the calculating for us and endowed us with emotions, in this case incest disgust. Our brains are developmentally sensitive to forming incest patternicities, and that happens even with people we grow up with who are stepsiblings or others not genetically related to us. This is a Type I error, a false positive, and it evolved because in our Paleolithic past the other people in our childhood homes were most likely blood relatives.

In his studies of herring gulls, Niko Tinbergen observed that when the chick perceived the mother gull’s yellow beak with a red dot, it promptly began pecking at it, which triggered the mother to regurgitate some food for her chick to eat. Further experimental studies of this phenomenon revealed that yellow bills with a red dot receive more