Please Read This (We’ve Crossed Our Fingers)

Before every game, New York Yankee Wade Boggs eats chicken (that’s 162 chicken meals a year) and engages in a two-hour ritual. A person having good fortune doesn’t talk about it without knocking on wood, so as not to jinx it. Gamblers rub dice together gently for a low number and vigorously for a high one. Pregnant women avoid funerals because it could harm the baby.

Superstitious ritual is the human species’ attempt to impose order, control and certainty upon a random universe. People resort to “magic” in situations where they lack control, where knowledge fails or when their success is based upon chance.

The practice is as common in technologically advanced societies as it is in primitive societies, say anthropologists and psychologists. Historically, superstition thrives during times of upheaval and uncertainty. While there is no proof that, say, crossing your fingers really does ensure a desired outcome, the ritual fosters a feeling of confidence, competence and control.

“Once real control has been exercised in extremely important events, people are not always satisfied,” says Stuart Vyse, a professor of psychology at Connecticut College in New London and author of “Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition” (due next year from Oxford University Press). “So they engage in superstitious activities. Students may have studied diligently, done all the rational things, but there is still a certain degree of uncertainty. In the time approaching the big event you can either be petrified or fill it with rituals that make you feel better.”

Countering the view that superstitions are only held by uneducated people, Vyse points to a ritual at Harvard University, where, before taking an exam, students stand on their tiptoes to touch the statue of John Harvard’s shoes for good luck. The more academically stellar the student, the more likely they are to use pretest rituals, says Vyse.

“An English study found that the children most likely to bring lucky charms to school, were more likely to do well” and go on to academically advanced schools. Among the stranger rituals was one discovered in a Canadian study where a number of college students believed success was assured if the pen they used for notes in class was also used for the exam. The reasoning: The pen “remembered the information.”

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Some magical thinking is the result of the human tendency to make wrong causal connections, says Thomas Gray, associate professor of psychology at Concordia University in Montreal.

“For instance, in ancient times people thought that bats had really good eyesight, which, of course is false because we now know they navigate by radar. But people who had visual problems would be given medicine made from bats. It would have made more sense from that point of view to give people ground up eyes of falcon. Alternative medical cures follow the same principle today.”

But how does the rational mind make irrational connections? James Alcock, a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, says that it happens automatically because of the basic architecture of the brain.

Research dating back to the 1920s indicates that the brain is wired to learn by making automatic associations between significant events that occur close together in time, says Alcock.

A stronger impression is made upon the brain when something significant occurs and a belief is confirmed. (You cross your fingers and win a game.) But a much weaker impression is made when we carry out a ritual and it fails.

“We are pre-wired to build up superstitious behavior,” says Alcock. “The brain sees patterns in things as related when they are not. People have the impression that the telephone always rings when you are in the shower. But the brain doesn’t note as strongly nonevents: the phone not ringing when you are in the shower.”

Once the brain makes a connection like that, it has difficulty disconnecting it, even if we know intellectually that it is wrong. This is because the brain operates like two brains, the emotional and the intellectual. In times of fear or great uncertainty and especially if knowledge or science fails, the emotional brain takes over.

“Even for critical thinkers, sometimes when the intellectual form of responding fails, emotional magical thinking takes over,” says Alcock. “Say you are an atheist and one day, something bad happens. You say a prayer from previous religious training and the bad thing goes away. The intellectual brain realigns with the emotional.”

You might say that is what happened to the brain of Jeri-Ann Galanti, an anthropology professor at Cal State L.A. When she bought a car, her grandmother, a Sephardic Jew living in Turkey, gave her a special bag of ingredients to protect her while driving.

“It contained garlic, Jordan almonds, blue ribbon and coins,” says Galanti, who is unsure of the purpose of each ingredient and does not believe in magic. “I thought, ‘Oh well, it probably doesn’t work but just in case.’ I got rear-ended and I didn’t think ‘Oh, it didn’t work,’ I just thought there wasn’t enough stuff in there. So I added more Jordan almonds and more garlic. I mean, I am a scientist. I think what it all comes down to is trying to control the scary universe.”

And goodness knows there is no scarier universe than Los Angeles freeways, which probably explains the panoply of weird stuff dangling from people’s rearview mirrors.