Forget black cats or the supposed consequences of walking under a ladder. Sometimes, flirting with superstition can be followed by decidedly strange events.
Freshman Dan Enking remembers a time that he and a friend of his decided to prove superstition to be wrong once and for all. "It was Friday the 13th," Enking said, "and my friend and I did 13 supposedly unlucky things to prove that nothing bad would happen."
Enking and his friend soon found cause to drop their cynicism. "Three days later, my friend found out that he had Lyme disease," said Enking, who admits to now being much more careful when it comes to superstitious belief.
Such a sequence of events could easily be chalked up to coincidence. However, a recent study published by scientists at Princeton and Harvard indicates that there are many people like Enking who find themselves inclined to interpret such events with "magical thinking," a term describing the belief that one's own actions or thoughts have an impact beyond that of empirical cause-and-effect relationships. The study was cited in an article by The New York Times in January.
In one of the studies, subjects told to visualize success for blindfolded people playing an arcade basketball game felt a degree of responsibility for the players' success, according to the article. In another study, individuals using voodoo dolls to wish harm on a colleague felt that they may have played some role in the faked headache that the colleague later displayed.
Unrelated to belief in a divine power, magical thinking is a surprisingly common mental phenomenon that takes place deep within the networks of the brain. Associate psychology professor and psychology graduate student program director Holly Taylor explained magical thinking as a manifestation of very basic human motivations.
"I think a lot of magical thinking comes out of a drive to find patterns," Taylor said. "We seek patterns as ways to explain a very complex world."
According to Taylor, people have a tendency to find patterns in their surroundings from a very young age.
"There's pretty good evidence that children learn to speak by finding statistical patterns of how words and sound comes together," Taylor said.
According to Taylor, it is this predisposition to seek significance in patterns that produces magical thinking. "Sometimes [pattern-finding] results in an illusory correlation," Taylor said. "People see things as fitting together when in actuality it is more a coincidental or random occurrence."
What kind of role does magical thinking play in the life of a college student? To find out, the Daily conducted an unscientific poll of 30 students of varying grade levels. Students were presented with the following situation: while sitting on a bench at school, having just applied for an internship with an organization with little to no publicity here at Tufts, they find that a pamphlet for that organization just happens to be sitting right next to them.
While nearly all of the students commented on what a strange coincidence this would be, 16 of the 30 would lend no supernatural weight to the matter, while 14 said that they would interpret the experience as being a sign indicative of good or bad luck.
Magical thinking in the above situation was often unconnected with conventional superstition. "I don't consider myself superstitious," freshman Laura Curren said. "But something like that would subconsciously affect me."
Those Tufts students who do find themselves engaged in magical thinking practice it in a variety of different forms. As Taylor suggested, some students take notice of patterns of events in their lives.
"I do notice parallels," chemical engineering graduate student Peter Kracke said, adding that he might attach significance to unexplained patterns in his life.
Junior Michelle Finston agreed. "I definitely believe in signs and parallels," she said, recalling an eerie time when, just before a family member passed away, a number of school assignments and other occurrences in her life all seemed somehow related to death.
Magical thinking can also extend beyond how people interpret the world to how one's own actions might affect it. Sophomore Lauren Jackson has one magical belief that she just can't break. "I tend to believe that three's a charm," she said.
In the world of academia and objective study, however, there is still a great deal of room for objective, non-magical thinkers. "Considering that I walked around with an open umbrella through Houston Hall for an entire day during Assassins," freshman James Kennedy said, "I'm obviously not superstitious."
