The Superstitious Pigeons

This particular post is a little special – not because of the content, but because I am wearing my lucky pair of jeans while writing this. Why you may ask? In the hopes that the readership of this blog will all of a sudden explode, simply because I am wearing an article of clothing that has done wonders for me before. Whenever I wore these jeans in my undergraduate exams, I always scored at least a solid C+. Yes, I made my parents proud even then. But coming back to reality, we all recognize that most of us make such frivolous and false connections regularly, no matter how irrational, outlandish, life-limiting and bogus such superstitions are. It is something about the human mind, which innately tries to see patterns where none exist and connect the dots that in reality are not connected.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a superstition is – “a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation.” The last part is of particular interest as that is the most common type of superstition people tend to have, many times without realizing it. Known as false causation, it is a fallacy committed when an argument is made that because X happened after Y, therefore X was caused by Y – post hoc, ergo propter hoc. It is to say that because the record number of deadly tornadoes that happened in US in 2011 was after Obama won the 2008 elections, the tornadoes occurred precisely because Obama won the 2008 elections. Well, on Fox News they might actually say this!

The famous Skinner Box used in his work on Operant Conditioning

Valuable time and resources (monetary and emotional) go to waste because we as a species are prone to attributing false causation to events – then become dismayed when our consequent actions do not bring the desired results. Superstitious behaviour is displayed by millions of people all over the world from all walks of life, but is it uniquely a human quality or are there other animal species that display behaviour resembling superstition?

This question was actually addressed decades ago by a prominent behavioural psychologist Burrhus Frederic (B.F.) Skinner. In his article, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 1948, Skinner provided results from a fascinating and simple experiment he did with pigeons. He took the pigeons that were put in a hunger state by limiting their daily food intake and then tested them in a specially designed box that could dispense food pellets at random intervals.

Skinner observed that his pigeons did something very interesting and unexpected; whatever action or behaviour the pigeons happened to do before the food pellet came down in the dispenser, they did more of it—known as adventitious or accidental reinforcement. One of the pigeons would turn clockwise and make two or three turns before checking for the food pellet; another would characteristically turn its heads upward in a particular corner of the box; another would make incomplete pecking movements towards the floor.

The birds had associated their peculiar behaviour with appearance of the food, thinking it was their action that was producing the pellet – a case of false causation and one of the primary types of superstition seen in humans. Moreover, whenever food was not obtained upon completion of the action, the animals would become even more persistent and keep repeating that behaviour until reinforcement would take place. This is very analogous to what we see in humans, where a superstitious behaviour is continued, even if it is not producing the desired effect – simply in the hopes that because the action produced a payoff some of the times in the past, it will eventually pay off in the future.

Neuroscience research shows that the human mind is habituated to constantly seek patterns and relationships between events and outcomes—that may or may not be related. And this instinct is evolutionarily hard-wired in our brains, because of its tremendous advantage it offered in the past to avoid or escape from predators. To our early ancestors, the cost of mistaking a light breeze for a lion might not be more than being mocked at. And if the ancestor was a nerd, that was inevitable to begin with. However, the cost of mistaking a lion for the wind would produce a bloody outcome, literally red in tooth and claw.

Now, even though our environment has changed, it seems that just like Skinner’s pigeons, we humans often convince ourselves that we have a greater influence and control over things that we desire. But we can get around this bias because unlike pigeons, we have a powerful prefrontal cortex – brain region associated with logical thinking and reasoning in humans among other things. And combined with scientific tools, we should make good use of it to regulate our subjective limbic system when making causal connections. As my friend Brian Scott phrased it – “Why should you take a bus, when you have a Porsche parked in the garage?”.

Source: http://www.atheistcartoons.com

It may be convenient to recourse to such superstitions, but staying hungry from sunrise to sunset as a ritual is not going to produce higher grades in academia; wearing that lucky, but unwashed underwear as a passionate fan has no relation with the loss or victory of a sports team; black cats crossing our path has nothing to do with our potential misfortune or death; not shaving for a week is not going to bring back that lost love (may bring some loose change though); and knocking on the wood or crossing fingers is not going to influence  one’s luck in anyway. Just because two events occur at the same time does not necessarily translates into one causing the other. Correlation does not automatically mean causation. Just ask the kid who lost his Wii controller.

For most of us, life is a mixed bag of joys and sorrows and if we want to face the challenges head on, we need to understand the source or root of a problem first in order to do something about it. We can either choose to bend reality and depend on irrational superstitions—handed down by traditions—to regulate our behaviour. Or we can choose to think independently and use reason to question and scrutinize first before accepting a causal relationship. Else, we will be in essence no different than Skinner’s gullible pigeons – bobbing our head in all possible directions, performing exaggerated but irrelevant gestures and thinking we are influencing the arrival of the proverbial pellet, as long as there is an occasional payoff. But at a point it becomes obvious that we are doing nothing more than simply fooling ourselves.

Sources and Interesting Links:

1. Skinner, B. F. 1948. ‘Superstition’ in the pigeon. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38, 168-172.
2. McLeod, S. A. 2007. Simply Psychology; Skinner | Operant Conditioning. Retrieved 5 April 2012, from http://www.simplypsychology.org.
3. Shermer, M. 1997. Why people believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and other confusions of our time. New York: Henry and Holt Company. 384p.
4. Shermer, M. 2001. The Borderlands of Science: Where sense meets nonsense. London: Oxford University Press. 360p.