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Hostages to fortune

Science has taught us that superstition is just a load of mumbo jumbo.

Even so, we carry on with an irrational array of rituals and practices to keep a step ahead of fate. Touch wood? Why bother when we know it makes no difference? By David Newnham.

David Newnham Saturday December 14, 2002 The Guardian

Saturday is market day, and Teresa is booked to capacity. By 11am, she is running 20 minutes late. But it's not easy working against the clock when you're trying to foretell the future. "You haven't got time for a fag," Sandy calls out as the clairvoyant makes for the door.

Then she lowers her voice and indicates where I'm standing. "There's your next one," she says. "He's been waiting 20 minutes already."

Sandy has a vested interested in keeping Teresa busy. Clients pay £20 for a half-hour session, £10 of which goes to Sandy for the use of the curtained-off changing area at the far end of her New Age shop. But this morning Teresa won't be hurried. She disappears out into the little precinct, leaving Sandy to apologise.

I'm in no hurry, I tell her, and it's true. A friend mentioned in passing last night that her mother had visited a fortune-teller a couple of years ago. The woman had read something unpleasant in her cards - something about an accident. Six months later, my friend's mother had died in a car crash. It's nonsense of course, we both agreed. But this morning I'm happy to wait.

And, while I'm waiting, perhaps Sandy could tell me about some of the stuff she sells? The crystals and incense sticks are self-explanatory.

But these black paper packets advertised as "Spells from a local witch". What do you get for your £9.99? The shop is packed, but Sandy opens one and begins showing me the printed instruction sheet and Cellophane sachets of dried herbs. ("No, of course they're not from Safeway," she says sharply. "Actually, I think the witch grows them herself - although not the pepper, obviously.") We are interrupted by a customer who wants to try on a cheesecloth dress. Yes, there is a changing room. Unfortunately, it's being used for readings at the moment. But if she's quick...

The customer slips behind the curtains just as Teresa reappears for my session. "Sorry 'bout that, my darling," she says, "but clients can get a bit tearful sometimes, and I need a fag afterwards. D'you wanna get started, then?"

Ask a psychologist, a sociologist or an anthropologist what makes us superstitious - why we queue in market towns for tarot readings, why we fill in our lottery tickets with the same lucky ballpoint every time, and risk back injury avoiding the cracks between paving stones - and they will tell you the same thing. When people feel that they have no control over events, they will suspend their belief in the rational and step into a world where the rules seem more flexible.

If levels of superstitious behaviour and interest in magic are a reliable measure of the extent to which we feel in control of our destiny, then these are worrying times. A century ago, it was confidently predicted that science and technology would drive out all superstition and religion within a generation or so. But science gave us the worldwide web, and the web hums with magic - with numerology and geomancy and 101 ways to win the lottery.

In the wake of Harry Potter, witches and spooks have cast their spell over children's television, and even science fiction now comes in Druid garb. A recent survey of British habits showed that we are as eager as ever to touch wood and toss salt - so long as it's sea salt, of course. And whenever a major sporting event takes place, we are left in no doubt that everybody involved, from the canniest professional to the lowliest fan, is engaged in a daily round of rituals that makes the average Haitian voodoo ceremony seem a lacklustre affair.

In the US, to the despair of rationalists such as Professor Stuart Vyse, people are getting more superstitious by the day. Vyse teaches psychology at Connecticut College, and in 1997 he published a book called Believing In Magic: The Psychology Of Superstition (OUP), in which he called for proper teaching of decision analysis and greater promotion of science education. But today he is pessimistic. "Things seem to be heading in the direction of greater belief in superstition, magic and the supernatural," he says. "I believe there is a continuing rejection of science, but I also think that some of these beliefs are market driven. Mediums are enjoying increased popularity in the US.

The paranormal sells, and popular images in films and on television produce an environment that fosters superstition."

There is good evidence, says Vyse, that anxiety makes people feel out of control, and that superstition provides a sense of control - if an illusory one. "To the extent that these are anxious times - here in the US things have become more anxious since last year's terrorist attacks - an increase in superstition is to be expected," he says.

It might seem obvious that we are more likely to seek out alternatives when forced to see ourselves as bystanders in the unforgiving world of cause and effect. But it was the Polish-born British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski who pinned down the idea in 1925 by coming up with a startling example of the principle in action. While observing fishermen at work in the Melanesian islands of Trobriand, he noticed that, when sailing in lagoons or close to the shore, the men relied entirely on their skill and experience to control their boats and locate fish. On venturing into the open sea, however, these same fishermen began using magical rituals, faced as they now were with unpredictable hazards.

More recent studies by Professor Giora Keinan of Tel Aviv University have established that magical thinking is also more likely when people are under stress. During the 1994 Gulf war, he found that superstitious and magical beliefs were more prevalent in regions exposed to missile attacks than in regions where there were no attacks. And in an ingenious experiment in which students were sat at a wooden table and asked identical questions about their health, he found that individuals with a high desire for control were more likely to tap the table and say "touch wood" when interviewed just before sitting exams than students questioned on a normal study day.

But it was in 1947 that a dozen pigeons gave researchers at the University of Indiana what was to prove the most fundamental insight into the roots of superstition and magic - even, many would argue, of religion itself. These birds were put on restricted rations, so that before long their body weight had fallen by 25% and they were permanently hungry. When each bird had, in the words of Professor Burrhus Frederic Skinner, been "brought to a stable state of hunger", it found itself spending several minutes every day in a special cage.

At one end of the cage was an automatic food hopper, linked to a timer so that it would swing into place every 15 seconds, and remain in place for five seconds before disappearing.

Crucial to the set-up was the fact that, no matter what the pigeon did, the food came and went at set intervals. For the purpose of the experiment was to observe what effect its comings and goings had on the pigeons. And, sad to say, it made them - and, by extension, us - look somewhat foolish.

Before long, one of the pigeons had begun making strange counterclockwise turns in the intervals between the hopper's arrival.

Others indulged in repetitive head movements, while two birds developed a complicated pendulum motion of the head and body. By the end of the experiment, six of the eight subjects were performing elaborate routines, clearly with the intention of hastening the return of the food. In each case, the routine grew out of some action that the bird had just happened to be performing when the hopper appeared.

Describing what is now regarded as a classic experiment, Skinner was in no doubt as to the mechanism involved: "The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behaviour and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking," he wrote.

And while much of what Skinner said and did in his lifetime was controversial (he partially reared his own daughter in an enclosed box until the age of two, for example), on this occasion few would argue with his analysis. Nor would anyone who has ever crossed their fingers have any problem with Skinner's other comment on the pigeons' behaviour: "The experiment," he said, "might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition."

"I don't get many men," says Teresa, adding an obligatory, "Stop it.

You know what I mean." In her leaflet, she describes herself as having a "down to earth" approach, and I am beginning to agree. Removing a hastily discarded coat hanger from a plastic chair, I sit opposite her as she fiddles with a tape recorder. A recording of the reading is included in the £20 fee, but the cassette makes such a squeaking noise that I realise I'm going to have to rely on memory.

We begin with a pack of cards illustrated with the sort of sentimental Victorian pictures that I associate with down-at-heel Catholic churches. Teresa asks me to shuffle the pack, to divide it in two and select a pile. Then she starts turning them over in front of me, one at a time, reading the caption at the bottom of each card and adding her own commentary.

And fishing. Yes, the woman is clearly fishing for information.

Here are some flames, and there is a knight in shining armour. "You can be quite fiery-tempered," she says. "But you're also a bit of a knight in shining armour, yes?" I nod weakly, unsure of how such a knightly tendency might manifest itself. "You can let me know if I'm right or not," she says. I tell her she's sort of right. "I know I'm right!" she snaps.

"Truth and integrity. So you like to be told the truth. The only time you tell a lie is if you have to, OK?" OK, I tell her, wondering if the man was yet born who couldn't honestly answer to such a description. But Teresa is after bigger fish than that.

"You have children? You're in work, am I right? I'd say you were a bit of a Peter Pan. And a practical joker, yes?" I nod unenthusiastically to each of these, and each in turn is worked into the patter that follows. But then she tells me I'm not sleeping. It's a safe bet, of course, that anybody prepared to splash out £20 on a fortune-teller has something weighing on their mind. But, in my case, it's just not true.

I make a mental note that the woman is a fraud - that nothing she says from here on need bother me in the least. I refrain from telling her that she's got it wrong, however. Who knows? If I make her cross, she might well bring forward the date of my forthcoming demise.

But when she casually drops the name Claire into the conversation, I want to know more. There's nobody called Claire looming large in my life, I tell her. "Claire," she says again. "I'll just leave that with you."

Argentinian goalkeeper Sergio Goycochea had a peculiar way with penalties. To ensure that Lady Luck was on his side, he would hitch up his shorts and urinate on the grass. What did it matter if several thousand fans were watching? It worked during the World Cup semi-final in 1990, so why stop now?

Ah, you say. But isn't that just the sort of baroque behaviour you'd expect in Latin America, what with all that magical realism and suchlike? Quite possibly. But it was Barry Fry who, as manager of Birmingham City, insisted on marking each corner flag with a little squirt before matches. Someone had told him that a drop of the yellow stuff would work like a charm for the Blues. It didn't, and he got the sack.

For each of these extreme examples of soccer superstition, there are a thousand minor offences to be taken into consideration. Clothes figure prominently - the same undergarments, never changed and never washed since whenever and whatever - socks pulled on in the same order, and laces tied, each knot woven like a secret spell.

In the case of the players themselves, there is perhaps something to be said for pre-performance rituals. There is evidence that ritual helps individuals under pressure, be they actors, mountaineers, soldiers or firefighters, by increasing their confidence, calming their nerves, focusing their minds, and perhaps even triggering useful unconscious mental processes. But the fans?

A survey conducted by the BBC during the last World Cup confirmed that supporters are supremely superstitious when it comes to willing their side to victory. "If Sunderland are losing by a goal," one respondent confessed, "I always take off my watch and put it into my pocket, and when they equalise I put it back on." Another always buys a packet of mints before the game and eats half the packet each half. Should such charms fail, the blame is readily pinned on some failure to perform the ritual properly, whereas success, such as the chance arrival of the food hopper in the pigeon cage, invariably reinforces the belief that the system works. We are, it seems, highly selective when looking for evidence to support our beliefs, remembering the successes but dismissing the failures.

"Although human thought is prodigious," says Stuart Vyse, "it is not without weaknesses and uncertainties. In a number of situations, we are prone to irrational rather than rational behaviour. We make erroneous conclusions, show biased judgment and ignore important information." At the heart of much superstition, he says, lie a number of common cognitive failings. "In particular, superstitious thinking springs from misunderstandings of probability and random processes, errors of logical reasoning, and cognitive short cuts that sacrifice accuracy."

Dr Gerda Reith, a lecturer in sociology at Glasgow University, has studied the thought processes that people use when gambling, and has been struck by our ability to kid ourselves about our chances of success when the desire to win is sufficiently strong. "If you want something quite badly and there's not much chance you're going to get it, you tend to think that the probability of getting it is higher than it really is," she says. "But if there's something negative that could happen to you, then you tend to think that it won't happen. We have a dual way of looking at risk. With the lottery, where the chances against winning are 60 million to one, people think, 'Yeah, I could win that.' But with things like lung cancer and smoking, where the chances are actually quite high, it's, 'Oh well, it probably won't happen to me.' The more you want something, the more likely you are to ignore the odds and battle on."

And when it comes to understanding those odds, says Reith, we are all of us more or less floundering. We can't begin to calculate what will happen in a game of chance such as the lottery because the best tool we have to work with is probability theory, a strangely counter-intuitive form of reasoning that tells us, for instance, that even if a coin has come up heads nine times in a row, there is still a 50:50 chance that it will come up heads the very next time we flip it.

"It took until the 17th century for people like Pascal and Fermat to work out how to think about chance," says Reith. "This was thousands of years after we had mastered arithmetic and algebra. We were quite advanced at mathematics and science, and we were colonising the world, but we still couldn't work out how to calculate risk or how to think about chance. And finally, around the time of the French Enlightenment, probability theory lumbered along and attempted to fill the gap.

"But the best that probability theory could do was to look at large runs of events. The law of large numbers tells you that, in the long run, there will be patterns, and that in a gambling situation, over a long, long time, red will come up as many times as black. But for people in real life, that doesn't help at all, because you don't care about what to do over the next 10 days or even the next year. You want to know where to place your bet now."

Once again, it's lack of control that gives superstition its strength.

Gamblers are notoriously superstitious, and lottery players employ every trick in the book, from the use of lucky Biros and mascots that the owner may associate with previous good fortune in some other context - what Reith calls "transferable luck" - to a form of Pythagorean numerology. But do we really believe, as the ancient Greeks apparently believed, that certain numbers have certain characters - that they are harmonious or ugly, or associated with good luck?

"They do believe it, and also, at the same time, they don't," says Reith. "It's like in quantum physics, where light can be a particle and a ray at the same time. When you're standing at the roulette table, you do believe it, but when you're away from it, you think of course you don't. No one would admit to it really. If you ask someone are they superstitious, you're bound to get the answer 'No'. But that's because you're asking a rational question, and most people are rational in their everyday lives. But if you could get inside their heads, I think you would find another part of them that does believe it."

The question of whether or not we who live in advanced industrial societies believe in magic has long exercised sociologists. After all, unlike Skinner's pigeons, we can read popular science books and watch TV documentaries, and we really should know by now what's going on.

Even if we don't fully understand the workings of the electric timer that controls the hopper, we should at least appreciate that no amount of head jerking and ritualised wing flapping will hasten the arrival of food. And yet we persist, when under pressure (which of us, in all honesty, would happily walk under a ladder on our way to take a driving test?), in trusting to charms that we then claim to dismiss as worthless. So what's going on?

Colin Campbell, professor of sociology at the University of York, rejects the assumption that modern superstitions are simply a continuation of old beliefs. The form might remain the same. But in essence, he says, they are "barely articulated, have virtually no coherent structure and are only partially accepted by those who carry out the associated practices". Unlike the Trobriand Island fishermen, who knew precisely what they believed in, most of us who touch wood have no idea why we do so ("Traditionally," says Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable, "certain trees such as the oak, ash, hazel, hawthorn and willow had a sacred significance, and thus protective powers").

But, says Campbell, we live in a society that places a high value on "doing something about it" and "getting things done" - what some theorists have called "instrumental activism". Because of society's belief "that all problems can be solved through the application of scientific knowledge and sustained effort to whatever serves as an obstacle to the realisation of human desires", people feel an overwhelming need to act, even in situations that they know to be beyond the influence of human agency.

C ampbell has suggested that the rational response in situations where the outcome is important and yet beyond the power of an individual to control might be inactivity, coupled with a mood of quiet resignation.

But, in reality, modern men and women do things. "They engage in a stereotyped and prescribed form of conduct; in effect, a ritual of some kind."

Such a ritual is really an expressive act, says Campbell, and while part of its value might be the emotional reassurance it brings, there might be more involved. "Perhaps individuals in modern society need not just the comfort and reassurance of the familiar, but have a need to be active rather than to accept passivity; a need to protect a fundamental orientation to action that is internalised in their personality and characteristic of their culture."

Gerda Reith is convinced that superstition can be a positive force.

"It gives you a sense of control by making you think you can work out what's going to happen next," she says. "And it also makes you feel lucky. And to take a risk or to enter into a chancy situation, you really have to believe in your own luck. In that sense, it's a very useful way of thinking, because the alternative is fatalism, which is to say, 'Oh, there's nothing I can do.' At least superstition makes people do things."

If Enlightenment thinkers would be astonished at the persistence in the west of what, in appearance at least, amounts to magical ritual, then the communist authorities who strove to eliminate such practices in China and the Soviet Union must be turning in their mausoleums.

For, according to Professor Steve Smith, a historian at Essex University, both countries are now seeing a massive resurgence in superstition of all kinds: in China, huge sums of money are being invested in ancestral temples, while faith healing and sorcery are increasingly popular, along with traditional wedding ceremonies which have little to do with formal religion; and in Russia, where tarot cards were once banned, all kinds of fortune-telling have become fashionable again. In both societies, says Smith, there are now frequent reports of witchcraft.

"If you suppress these things, it appears that they resurface much more vigorously once the persecution is eased. But, that said, I'm not convinced that these phenomena are necessarily the same as they would have been 50 years ago. If you look at health, for example, you can see a revival of belief in faith healing or sorcery or the evil eye or whatever, but somehow that now coexists with a much greater willingness on the part of ordinary people to believe in scientific medicine. They still consult the auguries as a kind of fall-back, but the two run in parallel."

Smith believes that there is a way in which rational modes of thought gradually establish themselves in the popular mind, and to this extent he thinks that there is something in the idea that modernity brings a kind of secularisation - what Max Weber, one of the founders of modern sociology, called the "disenchantment of the world". But as science becomes increasingly complex and incomprehensible, it fails to satisfy many psychological and emotional needs. "There is so much evidence that people don't find it wholly and by itself satisfying," says Smith. "And so, although it doesn't take peasants long to learn how a combustion engine works, they will still hang rosary beads in the car.

"The classic anthropologist's way of thinking about magic is in terms of our sense of inadequate control over our lives, which ought to mean that, as healthcare improves, our belief in the superstitious causes of ill health declines. But even in the most prosperous and secure societies, there is still a kind of existential insecurity, and no amount of popularised science is going to give you answers to those kinds of emotional needs. And that's where these other things attract people. There are psychological variables and there are personal variables, and some people are highly resistant to anything that smacks of irrationality. But, the fact is, lots of people rather enjoy reading their horoscopes."

It's several days now since I had my fortune told, and so far this knight in shining armour has managed to keep his fiery temper under control. But I guess that's "the Peter Pan in me", the honest joker making his presence felt...

Yes, it was all nonsense - at £40 an hour, little more than an overpriced opportunity to chat about myself. Which isn't to say, of course, that if someone - anyone - called Claire were to cross my path in the next month or two, I wouldn't give Teresa more credit than she deserved.

Now what are the odds against that happening?

Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002

---- "Taking a trip?

"What's that?"

"Taking a Trip."

"Yeah."

"Where to?"

"Oh, I dunno, wherever I end up I guess."

"Pal, I wish I were you."

"Really? Well, hang in there."

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