The limits of superstition
Silver skin shining like moon glow, it would have seemed more in place skimming the fast curves of Monaco than crawling the streets of my small American town. The driver saw me staring and noticeably puffed up. We don’t get many Porsches around here, and he was enjoying what he perceived as my vehicle-envy.
I was thinking: DEATH CAR.
We all have our little superstitions. I’m a fan of James Dean, the quintessential rebel who died before I was born … in a car crash … while driving a silver Porsche. Mr. Puffed Up couldn’t have gotten me into that car if he’d said I could sit on George Clooney’s lap
.
On the other hand …
If Hurricane Katrina were bearing down on us and that car were the only way out of town … Absolutely! Move over, Puffy, I’ll drive.
That’s the thing about superstitions, according to the findings of a recent Kansas State University undergrad research project: When it’s life and death, people forget all about them.
Gaining control
The researchers identified three reasons for superstitious behavior:
1. an attempt to gain control over uncertainty
2. an attempt to feel less helpless
3. a lazy way to cope without learning useful strategies
(For me, it just means I’ll keep driving my 10-year-old Toyota instead of buying a Porsche.)
They found that people who believe their lives are controlled by fate or chance are more likely to fall back on superstitions than those who believe they make their own luck. “It’s a parachute they think will help them out,” said Donald Saucier, associate professor of psychology and member of the research group.
For instance, if a difficult test were coming up, superstitious people might not study as much as they should but would take comfort in knowing they were wearing a lucky shirt or carrying some talisman But strangely, at the very time you’d expect them to most cling to those parachutes—when facing death—the research subjects’ first instinct was to forget lucky charms and try to help themselves.
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