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"Superstitions"
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Veḷiccappāṭint̲e bhārya : andhaviśvāsattint̲e ar̲upat Malayāḷa varṣaṅṅaḷ
Studies on religious superstition and rational thinking in Kerala, India.
Book
Q fever—the superstition of avoiding the word “quiet” as a coping mechanism: randomised controlled non-inferiority trial
AbstractObjectiveTo determine the validity of the superstition that utterance of the word “quiet” in a clinical setting increases workload.DesignProspective randomised controlled non-inferiority study.SettingMicrobiology department of a large teaching hospital in Lancashire, UK.ParticipantsTwo members of the medical microbiology team carried out the duty work on any given week day and an on-call team member on any weekend day. 29 days were assigned in which staff were to say “Today will be a quiet day” and 32 days were assigned in which staff were to refrain from saying the word “quiet” in any context.InterventionsEach day was randomly allocated to either saying “Today will be a quiet day” (intervention group) or refraining from saying the word “quiet” (control group) in any context.Main outcome measuresThe primary outcome was mean overall workload: a composite of number of clinically related telephone calls, clinically significant results, or validated results processed by the duty medical microbiology team during a 24 hour period referred to collectively as “clinical episodes.” A difference of 30 clinical episodes was considered as the margin of non-inferiority. Secondary outcomes included the individual components of the primary outcome.ResultsWorkload was measured each day over a 61 day period (1 May to 30 June 2019). A mean 139.0 clinical episodes occurred on control days compared with 144.9 on days when the experimental intervention was uttered, a difference of 5.9 (95% confidence interval−12.9 to 24.7). The upper bound was less than the specified margin of 30, providing evidence for non-inferiority. No evidence of a difference in workload was found between interventions with any of the four components, whether considering unadjusted or adjusted analyses, or looking at the subgroups of week days or weekends.ConclusionsThe study findings refute the long held superstition that utterance of the word “quiet” impacts on clinical workload, and therefore it should not be avoided. In the era of considerable staff shortages and increased work related stress, doctors should look to other methods to increase resilience and protect their wellbeing and mental health.Trial registrationLancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s research department SE-259.
Journal Article
Keep Your Fingers Crossed! How Superstition Improves Performance
Superstitions are typically seen as inconsequential creations of irrational minds. Nevertheless, many people rely on superstitious thoughts and practices in their daily routines in order to gain good luck. To date, little is known about the consequences and potential benefits of such superstitions. The present research closes this gap by demonstrating performance benefits of superstitions and identifying their underlying psychological mechanisms. Specifically, Experiments I through 4 show that activating good-luck-related superstitions via a common saying or action (e.g., \"break a leg,\" keeping one's fingers crossed) or a lucky charm improves subsequent performance in golfing, motor dexterity, memory, and anagram games. Furthermore, Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrate that these performance benefits are produced by changes in perceived self-efficacy. Activating a superstition boosts participants' confidence in mastering upcoming tasks, which in turn improves performance. Finally, Experiment 4 shows that increased task persistence constitutes one means by which self-efficacy, enhanced by superstition, improves performance.
Journal Article
Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies
Superstitions are commonplace in the modern world. Mostly, however, they evoke innocuous images of people reading their horoscopes or avoiding black cats. Certain religious practices might also come to mind-praying to St. Christopher or lighting candles for the dead. Benign as they might seem today, such practices were not always perceived that way. In medieval Europe superstitions were considered serious offenses, violations of essential precepts of Christian doctrine or immutable natural laws. But how and why did this come to be? InFearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies, Michael D. Bailey explores the thorny concept of superstition as it was understood and debated in the Middle Ages.
Bailey begins by tracing Christian thinking about superstition from the patristic period through the early and high Middle Ages. He then turns to the later Middle Ages, a period that witnessed an outpouring of writings devoted to superstition-tracts and treatises with titles such asDe superstitionibusandContra vitia superstitionum. Most were written by theologians and other academics based in Europe's universities and courts, men who were increasingly anxious about the proliferation of suspect beliefs and practices, from elite ritual magic to common healing charms, from astrological divination to the observance of signs and omens. As Bailey shows, however, authorities were far more sophisticated in their reasoning than one might suspect, using accusations of superstition in a calculated way to control the boundaries of legitimate religion and acceptable science. This in turn would lay the conceptual groundwork for future discussions of religion, science, and magic in the early modern world. Indeed, by revealing the extent to which early modern thinkers took up old questions about the operation of natural properties and forces using the vocabulary of science rather than of belief, Bailey exposes the powerful but in many ways false dichotomy between the \"superstitious\" Middle Ages and \"rational\" European modernity.
eBook
Dreams, nature, and practices as signs of the future in the Middle Ages
Seeking for signs of the future was a basic component of the pre-modern European mindset. The great variety of signs that are reviewed in the set of articles present commentaries on the time of their creation, whereas signs of the future display an ambiguous character.
eBook
The Myth of Evidence-Based Practice: Towards Evidence-Informed Practice
In this paper, we analyse the five steps of the evidence-based practice (EBP) model and argue that this model has serious limitations, both theoretical and practical. We argue that the relationship between evidence and practice cannot be that of supplying a basis, at least not if that notion is understood in any strict logical or methodological sense. Other factors have to be taken account of in addition to evidence and their relation to the evidence has to be explained. Following others, we advocate a more comprehensive view of practice as informed by evidence and theory. Evidence-informed practice (EIP) should be understood as excluding non-scientific prejudices and superstitions, but also as leaving ample room for clinical experience as well as the constructive and imaginative judgements of practitioners and clients who are in constant interaction and dialogue with one another. Under the EIP model, there is no need for the five-steps procedure of the EBP model, but only that practitioners will become knowledgeable of a wide rang of sources—empirical studies, case studies and clinical insights—and use them in creative ways throughout the intervention process.
Journal Article
Why Do People Believe In The Paranormal?, in Economist Video
From ghosts to aliens, throughout history many claim to have experienced paranormal events. Why is this, and how does science explain it?
Streaming Video
Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception
We present six experiments that tested whether lacking control increases illusory pattern perception, which we define as the identification of a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli. Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions. Additionally, we demonstrated that increased pattern perception has a motivational basis by measuring the need for structure directly and showing that the causal link between lack of control and illusory pattern perception is reduced by affirming the self. Although these many disparate forms of pattern perception are typically discussed as separate phenomena, the current results suggest that there is a common motive underlying them.
Journal Article
P values: from suggestion to superstition
A threshold probability value of ‘p≤0.05’ is commonly used in clinical investigations to indicate statistical significance. To allow clinicians to better understand evidence generated by research studies, this review defines the p value, summarizes the historical origins of the p value approach to hypothesis testing, describes various applications of p≤0.05 in the context of clinical research and discusses the emergence of p≤5×10−8 and other values as thresholds for genomic statistical analyses. Corresponding issues include a conceptual approach of evaluating whether data do not conform to a null hypothesis (ie, no exposure–outcome association). Importantly, and in the historical context of when p≤0.05 was first proposed, the 1-in-20 chance of a false-positive inference (ie, falsely concluding the existence of an exposure–outcome association) was offered only as a suggestion. In current usage, however, p≤0.05 is often misunderstood as a rigid threshold, sometimes with a misguided ‘win’ (p≤0.05) or ‘lose’ (p>0.05) approach. Also, in contemporary genomic studies, a threshold of p≤10−8 has been endorsed as a boundary for statistical significance when analyzing numerous genetic comparisons for each participant. A value of p≤0.05, or other thresholds, should not be employed reflexively to determine whether a clinical research investigation is trustworthy from a scientific perspective. Rather, and in parallel with conceptual issues of validity and generalizability, quantitative results should be interpreted using a combined assessment of strength of association, p values, CIs, and sample size.
Journal Article