Superstition

Many superstitions arose before and during the time of the Black Plague that swept over Europe. During the time of the Black Plague, Pope Gregory I the Great passed a law requiring people to say "God bless you" when somebody sneezed; this was said to prevent the spread of the disease and to cure whoever already had it.

Superstition and Religion

In keeping with the Latin etymology of the word, religious believers have often seen other religions as superstition. Likewise, atheists, agnostics, deists, and skeptics regard religious belief as superstition. Edmund Burke, the Irish orator, once said, "Superstition is the religion of feeble minds. From the broadest perspective, all religion is a form of superstition.

Religious practices are most likely to be labeled "superstitious" by outsiders when they include belief in extraordinary events , an afterlife, supernatural interventions, apparitions or the efficacy of prayer, charms, incantations, the meaningfulness of omens, and prognostications.

Greek and Roman pagans, who modeled their relations with the gods on political and social terms scorned the man who constantly trembled with fear at the thought of the gods, as a slave feared a cruel and capricious master. Such fear of the gods was what the Romans meant by 'superstition. For Christians just such fears might be worn proudly as a name: Desdemona.

The Roman Catholic Church considers superstition to be sinful in the sense that it denotes a lack of trust in the divine providence of God and, as such, is a violation of the first of the Ten Commandments. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states superstition "in some sense represents a perverse excess of religion.

Superstition and Psychology

In 1948, behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner published an article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, in which he describes his pigeons exhibiting what appeared to be superstitious behavior. One pigeon was making turns in its cage, another would swing its head in a pendulum motion, while others also displayed a variety of other behaviors. Because these behaviors were all done ritualistically in an attempt to receive food from a dispenser, even though the dispenser had already been programmed to release food at set time intervals regardless of the pigeons' actions, Skinner believed that the pigeons were trying to influence their feeding schedule by performing these actions. He then extended this as a proposition regarding the nature of superstitious behavior in humans.

Skinner's theory regarding superstition being the nature of the pigeons' behavior has been challenged by other psychologists such as Staddon and Simmelhag, who theorized an alternative explanation for the pigeons' behavior.

Despite challenges to Skinner's interpretation of the root of his pigeons' superstitious behavior, his conception of the reinforcement schedule has been used to explain superstitious behavior in humans. Originally, in Skinner's animal research, "some pigeons responded up to 10,000 times without reinforcement when they had originally been conditioned on an intermittent reinforcement basis. Compared to the other reinforcement schedules, these behaviors were also the most resistant to extinction.

This is called the partial reinforcement effect, and this has been used to explain superstitious behavior in humans. To be more precise, this effect means that, whenever an individual performs an action expecting a reinforcement, and none seems forthcoming, it actually creates a sense of persistence within the individual. This strongly parallels superstitious behavior in humans because the individual feels that, by continuing this action, reinforcement will happen; or that reinforcement has come at certain times in the past as a result of this action, although not all the time, but this may be one of those times.