(August 23, 2014 at 1:52 am)Esquilax Wrote: Superstitions and magical thinking aren't unique to the religious, they're human things. Hell, they're how religions began, really. There's nothing to stop an atheist from falling victim to those same cognitive errors even if they've rejected them where it concerns religion.Emphasizing mine. I'd like to counter the assertion that these are HUMAN things, I think they can be classified even broader than that, anything with a brain can exhibit "superstitious" traits. Superstition is an attempt to define a certain thing as a cause for another thing, when in reality, that "certain thing"
Some of it is probably cultural too. I still say "wish me luck," and stuff like that, but to me they're just expressions that denote a desire for positive thinking. I don't think it'll actually do something on its own, it's just a sort of convenient shorthand.
isn't actually related in any way. Take Skinner's pigeon experiment, the one with the timed food-trays. Without anything else happening (besides these food trays coming out at regular intervals), these pigeons developed odd behaviors in attempts to get the food boxes to open. In their minds, if they pecked that one corner, or stood on one leg long enough, they would be fed. And thus, superstition.
