The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [40]
Locus of control is also mediated by levels of certainty or uncertainty in physical and social environments. Bronislaw Malinowski’s famous studies of superstitions among the Trobriand Islanders in the South Pacific demonstrated that as the level of uncertainty in the environment increases so, too, does the level of superstitious behavior. Malinowski noted this in particular among the Trobriand fishermen—the farther out to sea they sailed the more uncertain the conditions grew, along with the uncertainty of success at a catch. Their levels of superstitious rituals rose with their levels of uncertainty. “We find magic wherever the elements of chance and accident, and the emotional play between hope and fear have a wide and extensive range,” Malinowski explained. “We do not find magic wherever the pursuit is certain, reliable, and well under the control of rational methods and technological processes. Further, we find magic where the element of danger is conspicuous.”25
I have made a similar observation on superstitions among athletes, most notably baseball players. As fielders succeeding over 90 percent of the time, they exhibit almost no superstitious rituals, but when they pick up a bat and go to the plate—where they are sure to fail at least seven out of ten times—they suddenly become magical thinkers employing all manner of bizarre ritualistic behaviors in order to cope with the uncertainty.26
Risk and control were tested in a 1977 study that found that if you show parachute jumpers about to leap out of a plane a photographic representation of noise (such as the “snow” on a television screen) they are far more likely to see a nonexistent embedded figure than if you presented it to them earlier. Uncertainty makes people anxious, and anxiety is related to magical thinking. A 1994 study, for example, showed that anxious first-year MBA students are far more conspiratorially minded than their more secure second-year colleagues. Even such base emotions as hunger can influence your perceptual patternicity. A 1942 study found that when ambiguous images are shown to both hungry and satiated people, the former are more likely to see food. And apropos the current recession, economic environments may lead to misperceptions where, in one experiment, children from poor neighborhoods and working-class families tend to overestimate the size of coins compared to the estimates made by children from wealthy neighborhoods and families.27
The relationship between personality, belief, and patternicity was explored by experimental psychologist Susan Blackmore, famous for her dramatic reversal from believer to skeptic of the paranormal after years of conducting research trying to find the elusive effects of ESP. What she discovered was that people who believe in ESP tend to look at data sets and see evidence of the paranormal, whereas skeptics do not. In one study, for example, Blackmore and her colleagues had subjects complete a paranormal belief scale, then presented them with photographs of common objects with varying degrees of degeneration into noise (0 percent, 20 percent, 50 percent, and 70 percent) and asked them if they could recognize and identify each object. The results revealed that believers were significantly more likely than nonbelievers to see objects in the noisiest images but to misidentify them. (See figure 5.)28 In other words, they saw more patterns but made more Type I false-positive errors.
A similar effect was found in an experiment in which subjects were asked to determine the probability of the roll of a die. Try it yourself. Imagine that you have a die in your hand that you roll three consecutive times and note the outcome. Which of the following sequences is more likely: 2-2-2 or 5-1-3? Most people say that the second outcome is more likely than the