Humans have cognitive tendencies that make superstitious beliefs easy to generate—and hard to extinguish. By "spirituality" here I do not mean awe, contemplation, or reverence in a broad sense; I mean the more specific belief that hidden forces—fate, synchronicity, spirits, or nonphysical "energy"—are actively guiding events. Beliefs in spirits, ghosts, magic, luck, or fate are widespread across cultures. The specifics vary wildly—local spirits, protective rituals, sacred objects, gnomes, invisible dangers—but the underlying psychology is similar.
At its root is pattern-seeking. The mind craves meaning, and when the world is uncertain or painful it will often manufacture meaning rather than tolerate ambiguity. This is not a sign of low intelligence; it is ordinary cognition under stress. And it does not stop at pattern. We also read agency into the world, and imagine hidden minds behind ambiguous events. The anthropologist Stewart Guthrie argued that this is the seed of religion itself: we are built to see faces in clouds and a watcher in the rustling grass. If you mistakenly assume that the shadow of a tree branch swaying in the wind is a tiger stalking you, you will still be alive in the morning. But if you mistakenly assume that an actual tiger is just a shadow in the wind, you and your family might not survive the night. A mind tuned that way will find agents everywhere, including where there are none. When people feel a loss of control, the appetite for pattern intensifies—and coincidence is more readily treated as signal. Superstition can be emotionally satisfying precisely because it converts randomness into a story.
Once a few people begin to read events through a "hidden forces" framework, it spreads: it gives language to fear and hope, it confers a sense of specialness, and it offers the pleasure of explanatory closure. Coincidences become "signs." Ambiguous perceptions become "messages." A confusing life becomes a legible plot. A person has a strong feeling—dread, relief, attraction, foreboding—and the mind is tempted to treat that feeling as information about the outer world. A difficult decision feels as though it has been answered by "the universe." A run of bad luck starts to feel orchestrated. The step from "this feels meaningful" to "this is meaningful" is, for most of us, a short one.
And sometimes the belief helps, at least in the short term. A ritual, a talisman, or the conviction that one has "good energy" can reduce anxiety, steady the nerves, and make a person readier to act. In that sense superstition works a little like prayer, or placebo, or a pre-game routine: it changes the person's emotional state, and the changed state can genuinely improve performance or endurance. But—exactly as with the faith healing and the diets earlier in this book—that does not validate the explanation. It shows that belief can move mood, attention, and confidence. It does not show that a mystical force is operating in the background.
When Meaning Hardens into Causation
The trouble begins when a poetic interpretation hardens into a literal theory about reality. At that point there is no longer a harmless sense of wonder; there is a false model of causation. There is still no robust, independently replicated evidence that psychic forces, spirits, or nonphysical "energies" of this sort actually guide events—and there is no good reason to treat a strong feeling of destiny as evidence that destiny is real. Once such feelings are treated as evidence, judgment drifts away from probability, base rate, character, and consequence. A person stays in a bad relationship because it feels "meant to be." Someone avoids effective medical treatment because the illness is thought to be spiritual. Someone takes reckless risks because fate is presumed protective. Life planning gets worse when omens and vibes displace sober attention to what is actually happening.
There is a darker social risk as well. Once people begin to believe that invisible moral or spiritual contamination clings to persons, places, or groups, superstition becomes a license for prejudice. History offers grim examples of what happens when communities weaponize these causal illusions. The early modern European witch crazes, which claimed tens of thousands of lives, were driven in large part by the urge to assign occult causality to illness, infant mortality, crop failure, or misfortune. Medieval blood-libel accusations, and the pogroms—organized mob attacks on a minority—that swept Jewish communities during outbreaks of plague, drew on the same fantasy of hidden contamination: when the Black Death arrived with no visible cause, Jews were accused of poisoning the wells, and thousands were killed across Europe. In Strasbourg, on Valentine's Day 1349, much of the Jewish community was burned alive before the plague had even reached the town.
In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, people with albinism are still hunted, mutilated, and killed for body parts believed to hold ritual power. In modern, everyday life the same pathology is more banal but no less real: a neighbour is said to have "dark energy." A house is called cursed. A child is treated as spiritually tainted. A stranger is felt to be threatening in some occult way rather than simply unfamiliar. Once a group shares such assumptions openly, they stop being private quirks and coalesce into a moral atmosphere in which exclusion, suspicion, and even violence come to feel justified. This is how a private comfort slides into public harm.
Even so, the topic calls for sensitivity, and this is where I want to be careful. For the person immersed in these beliefs, the experience is not frivolous. It feels visceral, self-evident, woven into memory from early life, and reinforced for years by trusted friends, family, charismatic figures, chosen anecdotes, online communities, and a steady diet of "paranormal" documentaries that showcase the apparent hits and quietly discard the misses. When a belief has been stabilized by familiarity, repetition, and community, challenging it feels less like an intellectual correction than like an attack on lived experience. The humane response is not to mock the feeling. The feeling is real. What deserves challenge is the conclusion drawn from it.
As a psychiatrist, I often feel stuck in a state where the only possible response to stories of this type has to be gentle, non-judgmental curiosity. I say "stuck" because I have to withhold a powerful urge within myself to reach for some evidence-based argument that would move the person away from such beliefs. In a sense this entire book is like that, on a larger scale. But I know the argument would not help, so I bite my tongue—and perhaps write a blog article afterward rather than start a clinical debate. Empathy and trust are the more powerful forces, and any real possibility of an evidence-based conversation about these topics takes far more time, empathy, and trust than most of us realize.
A Psychiatric View
From a clinical standpoint, people genuinely differ in their proneness to unusual, mystical, or numinous experience—and this variation is not itself pathology. Some people reliably feel awe, presence, synchronicity, and "spiritual certainty"; others rarely do. The psychologists Auke Tellegen and Gilbert Atkinson gave this trait a name—absorption, the disposition to become deeply immersed in imaginative and perceptual experience—and it is linked to hypnotic susceptibility, vivid felt significance, and openness to anomalous experience.
A useful, imperfect metaphor is that some minds run with higher gain. Turn up the gain on a receiver and faint signals become audible—but so does the static, and past a certain point the receiver begins to pull voices out of pure noise. An absorptive, high-gain mind receives the world vividly and meaningfully, which is a gift; it also runs a greater risk of hearing signal in what is only noise. The brain's salience machinery is part of this story, though it is not reducible to dopamine alone. And this is where the ordinary shades, by degrees, into the clinical. Shitij Kapur's influential account of psychosis describes it as a state of aberrant salience: a dysregulated system stamps neutral events—a passing car, a stranger's glance—with a feeling of intense personal meaning, and the mind, doing what minds do, builds an explanation to fit. The delusion is not a failure of reasoning so much as reasoning applied, faithfully, to a feeling of significance that should never have been there.
Frank psychotic delusions are, in a strange way, often easier to help than large-scale systems of false belief. There is usually a more immediate biological cause, and a few weeks or months of medication will often make the delusions recede—sometimes vanishing entirely, without a trace. But beliefs that have grown over a lifetime, braced by community, probably never vanish, even if they can lose some of their grip when the conditions are right.
There is one more thread worth pulling, because it bears on how we treat people who hold these beliefs. Gordon Pennycook and his colleagues have shown that a more analytic cognitive style—the habit of stopping to check an intuition against probability—predicts weaker paranormal and religious belief, and, crucially, it does so even after controlling for raw intelligence, education, age, sex, and politics. It is not that believers are less able. It is that the disposition to interrogate a compelling feeling varies from person to person—and, unlike intelligence, that disposition can be taught. The problem is not a deficient mind; it is an intuition left unchecked, and checking is a skill.
Spirituality and Religion
Many members of organized religions look down on "superstition" and free-floating "spirituality." Yet in psychological terms—at the level of cognitive ingredients—the difference is often one of degree rather than kind. Organized religion formalizes these same human tendencies: it standardizes the stories, professionalizes the interpreters, and binds belief to group identity and obligation. "Spirituality" tends to keep the intuitions while loosening the institutional grip. But both draw on the same human appetite for meaning, comfort, narrative, and relief from uncertainty. The gain is turned up in both sanctuaries; one has simply built more architecture around it.
I think I have a "high gain" mind—not in the way a gifted poet or artist does (I wish I had that kind of talent), but in a way I enjoy. I am easily moved to awe and wonder. In an emotional moment I cry easily. I feel things strongly, and I love unconventional thoughts, which tend to flow freely. But I also seem to have another part of myself that keeps a hand on the amplifier—perhaps I inherited the two from each of my parents, in a way that balances out. And I think balance is the point, for all of us. We cannot, and should not, try to eradicate parts of ourselves; the task is to learn to hold them in some kind of equilibrium.
References
Calin-Jageman, R. J., & Caldwell, T. L. (2014). Replication of the superstition and performance study by Damisch, Stoberock, and Mussweiler (2010). Social Psychology, 45(3), 239–245. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000190
Two high-powered, preregistered attempts to replicate the well-known "lucky ball" golf experiment, in which activating a superstition supposedly improved performance. Neither found any benefit, and a small meta-analysis of the best-designed studies found no effect. Even the appealing claim that superstition helps performance does not survive rigorous testing.
Guthrie, S. E. (1993). Faces in the clouds: A new theory of religion. Oxford University Press.
Argues that religion is rooted in a pervasive human tendency to anthropomorphize—to read human-like agency into wind, shadow, and chance. Guthrie treats this not as a defect but as a sensible perceptual strategy: in an uncertain world, over-detecting agents is safer than missing a real one. His account is the intellectual forerunner of the agency-detection theories of religion later formalized by Justin Barrett and others.
Kapur, S. (2003). Psychosis as a state of aberrant salience: A framework linking biology, phenomenology, and pharmacology in schizophrenia. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160(1), 13–23. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.160.1.13
The landmark aberrant-salience account of psychosis. Kapur proposes that dysregulated dopamine signalling assigns exaggerated significance to neutral events, so that ordinary coincidences come to feel intensely and personally meaningful; delusions are the mind's attempt to explain that misplaced significance.
Krummenacher, P., Mohr, C., Haker, H., & Brugger, P. (2010). Dopamine, paranormal belief, and the detection of meaningful stimuli. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22(8), 1670–1681. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2009.21313
A double-blind study using levodopa to probe how dopamine, paranormal belief, and the detection of meaning interact. The results were nuanced and in places counter-intuitive, and the authors are careful not to claim a simple causal chain. There is no simple "dopamine causes belief" story.
Levack, B. P. (2016). The witch-hunt in early modern Europe (4th ed.). Routledge.
The standard scholarly synthesis of the European witch trials of roughly 1450 to 1750. Careful regional accounting yields a consensus estimate near 45,000 executions out of perhaps 100,000 trials—genuinely "tens of thousands," but far below the wildly inflated figures of popular legend.
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. (2021). Independent Expert on the enjoyment of human rights by persons with albinism. United Nations. https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/ie-albinism
The UN mandate documenting the abduction, mutilation, and killing of people with albinism for body parts used in witchcraft-related ritual—more than six hundred reported attacks across some two dozen sub-Saharan African countries over a decade. The mandate and the accompanying Human Rights Council resolution frame these as ongoing, witchcraft-driven human-rights violations.
Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J. A., Seli, P., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2012). Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief. Cognition, 123(3), 335–346. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2012.03.003
Across two studies, a more analytic cognitive style predicted weaker religious and paranormal belief even after controlling for cognitive ability, education, sex, age, and political orientation. Belief tracks thinking style—the disposition to check an intuition—more than raw intelligence, and for the hopeful corollary that such a disposition can be cultivated.
Tellegen, A., & Atkinson, G. (1974). Openness to absorbing and self-altering experiences ("absorption"), a trait related to hypnotic susceptibility. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 83(3), 268–277. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0036681
The paper that introduced "absorption," the stable disposition to become deeply immersed in imaginative and perceptual experience. The trait is repeatedly linked to hypnotic susceptibility, vivid felt significance, and proneness to anomalous experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment