Superstitious Behavior Research Articles

Investigation of Superstitious Behavior Tendencies of Professional Football Players and Coaches

This study aims to elucidate the superstitious behavior tendencies of professional football players and club coaches. The research group consists of 22 football players and 9 football coaches selected through the "Criterion Sampling" method. The research is considered as basic qualitative research. These are qualitative research studies in which data are collected through documents, interviews, or observation analyses. The research design employed in this study is phenomenology (phenomenological research design) which is a qualitative research design. In this research, “Superstitious Belief” has been selected as the phenomenon and the meanings attributed to this phenomenon by football players and coaches are attempted to be revealed. Semi-structured interview forms have been prepared to identify the superstitious behavior tendencies of players and coaches. In this context, open-ended questions are asked to the participants to determine their superstitious behavior tendencies. The data obtained have been analyzed using the content analysis method. According to the findings, the Superstitious Behavior Tendency comprises a theme, a sub-theme, and six categories. Under the sub-theme of superstitious behavior tendencies among professional football players and coaches are the categories of Clothing-Appearance, Lucky Objects, Pre-match Ritual, In-match Behavior, Team Ritual, Faith and Prayer. The opinions of players and coaches regarding the questions prepared for this theme are presented. Word clouds have been created illustrating prominent codes under the identified categories based on data obtained from interviews with participants. In conclusion, beyond effective preparation and training phases for performance enhancement, it is discerned that some superstitious behavior tendencies exist among players, contributing to elevating their motivation and self-confidence to higher levels.

Development of a Naïve Theory of Superstition

ABSTRACT Superstitious behaviors persist across time, culture, and age. Although often considered irrational and even potentially harmful, superstitions have recently been shown to have positive effects on stress levels, confidence, and ultimately, performance. However, it remains unclear how people conceive of superstitious behaviors, specifically, whether people attribute apparent superstitious efficacy to magical forces or to something else, such as reduced stress or increased confidence. In two studies we asked 6- to 9-year-old children and adults from the United States to rate how causally connected superstitious behaviors were to desired outcomes. In Study 1, participants provided open-ended responses to questions probing why they believed the actions were tied to the outcomes. Participants were more likely across ages to offer natural than magical explanations to explain the connection – this became more pronounced with age. In Study 2, half the stories did not permit a plausible natural explanation, thus any perceived causal relation could only be attributable to magic. Participants were asked how connected the superstitious behaviors were to the outcomes. We found significant differences in ratings of connectedness between stories that held plausible natural explanations and those that did not in our adult sample only. Our findings suggest that people recruit their naive psychology when reasoning about the efficacy of superstitious behaviors; however, children may also believe magic to be causally relevant.

Study of Stress Level Contributing To the Superstitious Behavior

In this research, researcher studied the relation between stress and superstitious behavior. This study carried out in UP. To assess the level of stress, stress scale of M.Singh (2002) has been used and to assess superstitious behaviour self-constructed scale has been used. Chi square technique has been used for data analysis. The relation between stress level and superstitious behaviour is significant at 0.01 level of confidence. Hence, it has been concluded that high stress lead to high superstitious behaviour.

Jinx, Control, and the Necessity of Adjustment: Superstitions Among Football Fans.

Superstitions are behaviors human beings use to gain a sense of control over certain events in their lives. Thus, sport and its inherent uncertainty provide fertile ground for superstitious behavior. Research on this subject has focused mainly on athletes while examining the behavioral expressions, motivations, and characteristics of fans’ superstitions that have remained marginal; therefore, the present paper aims to address this lacuna by analyzing these behaviors as part of sports fandom and fans’ daily routines. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 24 Israeli football fans of local teams. Key findings illustrate two themes: time dependent acts of superstition; and place. It is argued that superstitious behavior serves fans in two ways. First, making them feel their actions influence the match outcomes and helping their favorite team beyond simply cheering in the stands. Second, reducing the level of uncertainty and subsequent stress level characteristic of being a sports fan. Furthermore, following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic when fans’ access to stadiums was restricted, the results show that the fans’ absence from the stadiums led to a reduction in the quantity and frequency of their superstitious behaviors, pointing to the significance of sporting venues in fan behavior.

Preliminarno istraživanje sujevernog ponašanja u orijentiringu

Superstitious behaviors stem from athletes' need to reduce competitive pressure and uncertainty of outcome, as it gives them the illusion of control over a number of external factors (luck factors) that may affect their competitive result. This study aims to determine the presence of superstitious behavior, its relationship to age, gender, competitive experience and self-confidence of competitors, and adequacy of Bleak and Frederick scale (1998) use to our athletes. From the original Superstitious Rituals Questionnaire developed by Bleak and Frederic (1998), after translation into Serbian, four items were removed, and the question of confidence in one's own orienteering skills was added, and the respondents were allowed to list personal superstitious behaviors not mentioned in the questionnaire. The questionnaire was completed by 78 orienteers (45 men, 33 women), aged 10-70 years and with an average competitive experience of 15.2 years. Based on the obtained research results, it was determined that from 10 to 68% of Serbian orienteers use 15 out of a total of 41 superstitious rituals, that the average number of these rituals per respondent was small (M/SD = 5.38 +/-3.46), that their effectiveness assessed on a scale of 0-5 was low (2.88 +/-1.31), that no one used 6 rituals, and that a significant number of orienteering-specific rituals were listed that were not present in the applied questionnaire. There is a significant positive correlation between the number of uses of superstitious rituals and female gender (r=.25), and a negative one with age, competitive experience, and self-confidence in orienteering skills (r=-.40; -.38; -.39, respectively). The fact that Serbian orienteers practice a relatively small number of superstitious behaviors listed in the applied questionnaire, mentioning at the same time, other superstitious rituals that they usually consider necessary routines of pre-start preparation, indicate the need to construct a new superstitious behavior questionnaire specific to orienteering and our sports culture.

Magic Medicine.

A superstition is a belief or practice that is considered irrational, resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance or a false conception of causation. In medical settings superstitions often arise from attempts to assign causation to events that are either random, or in which all information is not available. In this manuscript, we present a descriptive review of the literature related to superstition in medicine and present the results of our own data; that one's age is equal to the chance of being admitted from the emergency department. In the descriptive review of superstitious beliefs in medicine, we identified 295 articles in which specific superstitions were studied. These articles were then organized by field and specific superstition. To investigate the age and admission correlation, we retrospectively quarried over 250,000 charts. 295 papers on specific medical superstitions were reviewed and presented according to specialty, population and commonly investigated superstitions. Psychiatry had the largest number of articles addressing superstitious behavior, followed by OB/GYN. Importantly, significant heterogeneity exist within these papers suggesting that superstitious beliefs can be found in all fields of medicine. In addition, our data did not support the superstition that a patient's age will mirror their admission rate. The majority of the superstitions identified were "harmless" in that they would not result in significant patient harm. The exponential growth in medical knowledge presents a challenge for many to stay up to date. Our findings suggest a need for a continued emphasis of scientific literacy among physicians and further establish the expectation that physicians be engaged in consuming the latest scientific evidence in their field.

Women’s Softball and the Collaborative Spirit of Magic

All major US sports are high in superstitions because motivation to win is high and the game outcome is uncertain; athletes purportedly engage in superstitious behavior to reduce anxiety, build individual confidence and cope with uncertainty. Sports is also a male domain, where men traditionally display individual, masculine achievement. We observe magic rituals practiced in a women’s college softball team not as a means to overcome anxiety or display individual prowess, but as a way to blend creative individuality into the unity of the social whole, which manifests as a social narrative of the team. We analyze individual and team magic in two forms –institutionalized magic and individual superstitions – which build idiosyncratic behavior into a collective team dynamic. As such, this essay shows how women use magical power collaboratively. Women on a college softball team partake in practical work and magic, such that participating in magic through empathy and sensing one another creates team identity, allowing the reimagination of forms and outcomes.

Purchasing luck: The impact of scarcity cues on superstitious behavior

AbstractResource scarcity is prevalent in consumers' everyday lives. In contrast to the prior research suggesting that resource scarcity rationalizes consumers' decision‐making, this research examines when and why resource scarcity enhances consumers' superstitiousness, as represented by their preferences for lucky products. Six studies demonstrate that resource scarcity arouses consumers' desire for control, which, in turn, drives consumers to pursue lucky products. The paper concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and empirical implications of the results.

INVESTIGATION OF SUPERSTITIOUS BEHAVIOR OF AMATEUR FOOTBALL PLAYERS

Bu çalışma amatör futbolcuların batıl inanç davranışlarını incelemek amacı ile hazırlanmıştır. Araştırma örneklemini 2018 yılında Gaziantep ilinde amatör futbol oynayan toplam 389 (45 kadın, 335 erkek) sporcu oluşturmaktadır. Araştırmada elde edilen verilerin SPSS 22.0 paket programından yararlanılarak istatistiksel analizleri yapılmıştır. Verilerin değerlendirilmesinde istatistik yöntem olarak; frekans, yüzde, ortalama, standart sapma, iki bağımsız gruplar için t-testi ve ikiden fazla bağımsız grubun karşılaştırılmasında ANOVA ve LSD çoklu karşılaştırma testleri kullanılmıştır. Araştırma sonucunda; amatör futbolcuların cinsiyet değişkeni ile uğurlu sayılan nesneler, oyun karşılaşma öncesi, oyun sırası, takım davranımları alt boyutları ve toplam batıl inanç puanıyla anlamlı fark olduğu (p<0,05), yaş değişkeni ile giyim/görünüş, uğurlu sayılan nesneler, oyun karşılaşma sırasında, oyun sırasında, takım sırası, takım davranımları, dua etme ve toplam batıl puanıyla ve yıl değişkeni ile uğurlu sayılan nesneler alt boyutunda anlamlı fark olduğu görülmektedir (p<0,05).

Uncovering Underlying Processes Before Illusion of Control Begins in Gambling Disorder: A Pilot Study.

Gambling Disorder (GD) is characterized by persistent betting even in face of accruing debts and psychosocial hardship. Gambling Disorder behavior has been linked to conditioning, cognitive distortions and superstitious behavior. Previous studies have demonstrated that during response-outcome analytical tests (ROAT), non-gambling individuals are precluded from response extinction when failure feedback is suppressed, and develop superstitious behaviors and illusion of control instead. Gambling can be regarded as a ROAT paradigm in which disordered gamblers (DGs) fail to compute failure feedback; hence they do not perceive the independence between response and outcome. In order to investigate early phenomena on response and outcome processing in DGs, we developed two short ROAT versions, one with a controllable outcome and one with an uncontrollable outcome, both with explicit failure feedback. Twenty DGs and twenty healthy controls were assessed using this novel paradigm. Compared to controls, DGs reported higher distress during the controllable ROAT, less self-confidence in the uncontrollable ROAT, and more random responses and less use of analytical strategies in both tests, evidencing potential deficits in cognitive control. In contrast to previous findings, DGs did not demonstrate more superstitious beliefs, or illusion of control, and were generally more skeptical than controls regarding the controllability of both ROAT versions. Taken together, our findings provide some support for deficits in cognitive control in GD that precede illusion of control and superstitious behaviors.

What’s hidden in my filedrawer and what’s in yours? Disclosing non-published findings in the cognitive science of religion

ABSTRACT Despite recent developments to improve the transparency of scientific research, the field is in need of a new and effective way to communicate non-significant or unpublished findings to a broader audience. In this short report, I present an overview of different unpublished studies that we conducted in my lab over the past years. Across the different studies we observed consistent effects of our experimental manipulations or variables of interest on self-report measures, but less so on behavioral and neurocognitive measures. For instance, religious people said they were more prosocial but did not donate more money (Study 1 and 2); participants experienced awe but this did not affect their body and self perception (Study 6 and 7); participants had mystical-like experiences but this did not affect the perception of their peripersonal space (Study 8 and 9); and self-reported magical thinking was unrelated to superstitious behavior (Study 11). In other studies, the hypothesized effects did not bear out as expected or were even in an unexpected direction. Participants perceived more agency in threatening pictures and scenarios, but this was not related to their supernatural beliefs (Study 3–5) and a death priming manipulation reduced rather than increased participants’ religiosity (Study 10). Thus, opening the filedrawer through the publication of short reports will hopefully further increase transparency and will help other researchers to learn from our own trials and errors.

Superstition revisited: Sex, species, and adventitious reinforcement

Skinner’s (1948) ‘Superstition’ in the Pigeon paper proposed that accidental response-reward contingencies, via adventitious reinforcement, could operantly condition the behaviors of pigeons under fixed-time (response-independent) schedules of food delivery. Skinner likened the behavior of pigeons under these fixed-time schedules to the superstitious behavior of humans and proposed that both response patterns were the result of contiguous pairings of rewards following some response. Alternative explanations of superstitious behavior have included Staddon and Simmelhag’s (1971) stimulus substitution account and Timberlake and Lucas’s (1985) elicited species-typical appetitive behavior account. Under both these alternative explanations of superstitious behavior, observations of pigeons under fixed-time schedules revealed a lack of idiosyncratic responding, which is a critical element in Skinner’s explanation of superstitious behavior via adventitious reinforcement. The following study implemented 4 fixed-time schedule experiments to further study superstition. In Experiment 1, male and female pigeons were compared, which provided support for the disparity in response patterns observed in previous studies. Experiments 2–4 examined the behavior of roller pigeons, ring-necked doves, and bantam chickens. In all the above studies, a lack of idiosyncratic responding and emergence of species-typical foraging behavior was observed. The results provide additional evidence that the ‘superstitious’ behavior that emerges in pigeons and other organisms under response-independent food schedules is the result of elicited species-typical food getting behaviors, and that these behaviors emerge as a result of frequent food deliveries in environments that support such foraging repertoires.

Effect of response-independent delivery of positive and negative reinforcers on the development of superstitious behavior and belief in humans.

The present study investigated the development of superstitious conditioning, including sensory superstition, under positive reinforcement and avoidance conditions. College students were instructed to produce the textual stimulus GOOD on a computer screen (positive reinforcement condition) or to pre

William Timberlake: An Ethologist’s Psychologist

William Timberlake was one of several psychologists who, in the wake of traditional learning theory, aimed to develop an improved theoretical basis for the study of learning via greater incorporation of ecology and evolution. In this short biography, I place Timberlake’s varied work in historical context. Originally trained as a neoHullian behaviorist, Timberlake sought to integrate the laboratory approach and methodological rigor of behaviorism, with the ethologist’s interest in the animal as such. Starting at Indiana University in 1969, he stayed there his entire professional career, where he was one of the founders of the university’s internationally recognized Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior. He is best known for his behavior systems theory, which characterizes animal behavior as an evolved complex hierarchically organized system. Timberlake has also made diverse contributions to the study of reinforcement, explanations of superstitious behavior and misbehavior, and the understanding of circadian rhythms and their modification, among other areas.

Are hotel guests bothered by unlucky floor or room assignments?

Superstitious beliefs can guide individuals’ decision-making and change behavior. Different cultures believe that some numbers are ‘lucky’ and other numbers are ‘unlucky’. This can have significant business implications. There is little academic research into how these numerology superstitions impact the hotel sector. We conduct a quantitative survey among Chinese and Western hotel guests to determine the extent to which these guests are influenced by numerological superstitions in their hotel floor and hotel room numbering. Socio-demographic, psychographic and situational characteristics are used as explanatory variables. The results show that the Chinese were more likely to engage in superstitious behavior when it comes to feeling uncomfortable and seeking a change from an unlucky hotel floor and room number than Western guests. For the Western cohort, internal (demographic and psychographic) determinants of superstitious behavior are more significant, whereas, in the Chinese cohort, both internal and external (situation, or trip-specific) determinants influence superstitious behavior.

КОНФЛИКТОГЕННЫЙ ПОТЕНЦИАЛ САКРАЛЬНОГО ПРОСТРАНСТВА ПРАВОСЛАВНЫХ ХРАМОВ (НА ПРИМЕРЕ ГОРОДСКИХ ЦЕРКВЕЙ САНКТ-ПЕТЕРБУРГА)

A seriality of traumatic experience of the Orthodox temples attenders inspires an analysis the problem with a focus on surplus informal negative sanctions on the part of church staff towards church-attenders. Informal negative sanctions repertoire includes both verbal (comments, rebukes) and kinetic (interruption of private space or physical displacement away the trajectory of locomotion) pretenses. The main question of the paper investigates the structure of sacral space: how does its geometry provokes constant conflicts. A configuration of the Orthodox churches’ sacral space (in particularly, in the main cathedrals of S-Petersburg Metropolis of the Russian Orthodox Church) due to a high altar bar, predestinating trajectories of locomotion and direction of attenders’ sight, provides a shortage of acoustic and visual attenders’ involvement into a worship-service. A redistribution of these loci between churchgoers creates a main drama of their mutual attendance during a liturgy. Outside of liturgy a trajectory of visitors as a rule synchronizes with a running along a church perimeter, i.e. the belt of tangible objects (icons flanked by candlesticks, reliquaries) – mediators of sacral communication. Though even thinly populated, a church place forces attenders find themselves in condition of a space shortage, so far as a trajectory of their locomotion is near to be interrupted by church staff, controlling both an appearance of visitors, their potential invasion into loci with unobvious lines and a correspondence their actions to a set of rules with a high degree of implicitness. A collision in this case is provokes by a functional ambiguity, when a church, represented as a religious facility aimed public worships, in a break between services acts both a space for private requires or individual prayer, and as a commercial institute for religiously marked items selling, and sometimes as a museum-concert complex targeted leisure pastime. An extra well of a sacred space collisions is an insider parish status asymmetry, when an activity of catechism is occupied not by clerics or catechists, but by elder ladies with a superstitious behavior as their peculiarity.

A Functional Motivation Framework for Examining Superstitious Behavior

AbstractAre all superstitious behaviors driven by the belief in the behavior’s instrumentality? Why do superstitious behaviors persist even in the face of counterevidence? Drawing on the functional...

Expectancy Neglect: Why Superstitious Acts Increase Risk Seeking in Gains but Risk Avoidance in Losses

Consumers are known to be loss averse—they seek risk when facing losses but avoid risk when anticipating gains. In this research, we posit that engaging in a superstitious act can reverse these effects by invoking fatalistic notions (e.g., “it is meant to be”) and reducing deliberation. Reduced deliberation is known to increase the use of extreme values as reference points and to lower the consideration of outcome expectancy. Consequently, consumers consider the best possible gain (worst possible loss) rather than expected gain (loss) and become more risk seeking (risk averse) in gains (losses). Four experiments involving real behavioral measures provide support for our proposition. We thus offer a new perspective on how engaging in superstitious behaviors reduces deliberation and affects risky choice.

Superstitious behavior and stock returns: The case of Javanese traditional calendar

Some Indonesian people who are still attached to traditional rituals, often mark several days on their Javanese calendar as sacred days. This study aims to investigate the influence of the sacred days between daily cycles in Georgian calendar with pasaran cycle in Javanese calendar toward Jakarta Composite Index (JCI) returns in a period of January 2009–June 2016. The data was analyzed using Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity in Mean (GARCH-M). This study found some sacred days i.e. Kliwon Friday and Wage Thursday resulted in a lower return than the normal day, while Wage Thursday had a significant effect on the return of the Jakarta Composite Index (JCI). These findings indicated that investment decisions made by investors were still influenced by superstition, which leads to behavior biases.

Behavior and illusions: a model to study superstition in a participant replacement experiment

The notion of superstitious behavior can provide a basic background for understanding such notions as illusions and beliefs. The present study investigated the social mechanism of the transmission of superstitious behavior in an experiment that utilized participant replacement. The sample was composed of a total of 38 participants. Participants performed a task on a computer: they could click a colored rectangle using the mouse. When the rectangle was in a particular color, the participants received points independently of their behavior (variable time schedule). When the color of the rectangle was changed, no points were presented (extinction). Under an Individual Exposure condition, ten participants worked alone on the task. Other participants were exposed to the same experimental task under a Social Exposure condition, in which each participant first learned by observation and then worked on the task in a participant replacement (chain) procedure. The first participant in each chain in the Social Exposure condition was a confederate who worked on the task “superstitiously,” clicking the rectangle when points were presented. Superstitious responding was transmitted because of the behavior of the confederate. This also influenced estimates of personal control. These findings suggest that social learning can facilitate the acquisition and maintenance of superstitious behavior and the illusion of control. Our data also suggest that superstitious behavior and the illusion of control may involve similar learning principles.