A new blog friend, Konrad Talmont-Kaminski, a naturalist philosopher in Poland, shares an interest in bounded rationality. He is thinking hard about superstition and the question was posed to me:
Given the connection between stress and superstition the army must be a good place to run tests. Do you think the military are among the more superstitious groups of people?
my first thoughts, without trying for a formal definition of superstition, or pretending to know any of the literature, are these:
i think we are very “superstitious” in the sense that we have invested a lot of belief in “rules of thumbs” and the received wisdom of very successful leaders in the past. We take up their advice with religous fervor.
What I find interesting is that this is also a culture that places a very high value on rational, analytical control to achieve certainty. Yet, when the stress levels go high and you must choose in the absence of certainty, military officers revert even more quickly and stubbornly to the chestnuts of the past.
An example: we revere Clauswitz and Jomini, studying them carefully. In what other profession that idealizes certainty and modernity do you see the leading philosophers living in the 19th century? Is their content really that timeless or has our culture placed them on such a high pedestal and invested such emotion in being right that we are locked into this “superstition”?
At the same time, based on my experience in combat, I have seen how soldier latch on to rituals to help keep themselves alive on the next mission, even when the rational mind must be certain that it is not related to reality in any way. In the same way, we read all the time about professional athletes who repeat all the behaviors they performed before their last win.
Ken Dryden, the goalie from the Montreal Canadiens, describes that phenomenon well in his terrific book, “Behind the Mask”. The rule in the clubhouse was “Don’t change the luck!”. People need explanations for uncertainty and chaos. The more the uncertainty, the stronger the need for an explanation no matter how ludicrous. And if the ludicrous belief becomes socialized, then it can achieve “Revealed Truth” status , I think.
I am probably not using superstition in the formal sense but this is the paradox I see.