Chapter 24 Superstition

Dr. Samuel Johnson put his right foot first every time he stepped out of the house for good luck, and he always avoided cracks in the pavement when he walked on the sidewalk.Adolf Hitler believed in the magical power of the number 7.U.S. President Woodrow Wilson believed the number 13 had been bringing good luck into his life. He said his name was composed of 13 English letters. He became the 13th president of Princeton University after 13 years. .His Royal Highness Prince Philip gently taps his polo cap seven times before each polo match.Top Swiss tennis player Martina Hingis is said to avoid stepping on the "sidelines" on either side of the court when playing.American basketball star Chuck Persson admitted that he would definitely get nervous if he didn't eat two Kitkats or two Snickers or one Kitkats and one Snickers before a game.Even Nobel laureate Niels Bohr is said to have placed a horseshoe by his door. (While this example is debatable as evidence that people are always superstitious, when asked if he really thought horseshoes would bring him good luck, Pohl replied, "No, but I've been told that regardless of Believe it or not, it brings me good luck.")

These irrational thoughts and actions are of course not limited to princes, politicians and physicists.In a recent Gallup poll, 53 percent of Americans said they were at least a little superstitious, and 25 percent admitted to being somewhat or very superstitious.According to another survey, 72% of the public said they have at least one lucky charm.The results of the 2003 Superstition Survey, which I jointly conducted with the British Association for the Advancement of Science, also showed that superstition is also prevalent in modern British society.About 80 percent of people habitually knock on wood to avoid bad luck, 64 percent cross their fingers and 49 percent avoid walking under ladders.Even some of the brightest students at American universities make similar moves.For good luck, Harvard undergraduates routinely touch the feet of John Harvard's statue before their exams, while MIT students touch the nose of a bronze statue of inventor George Eastman.Over time, Harvard's feet and Eastman's nose have been smoothed by this superstition.While many traditional superstitions are relatively harmless, such as knocking on wood or wearing lucky charms, others have very serious consequences.

In early 1993, researchers wanted to know whether house number 13 actually brought bad luck to those who lived in it.They placed advertisements in more than 30 local newspapers, hoping that people who live in the "13" house will get in touch with them and find out if they are indeed getting farther and farther away from good luck after moving into the house.As a result, 500 households responded, and about 10% of the households said that they did encounter more bad luck after moving into No. 13.The researchers also wanted to know whether this superstition affected house prices, so they conducted a national survey of real estate agents on the subject.They were taken aback by the survey results, with 40 per cent of agents saying homebuyers are generally reluctant to buy a house with number 13, forcing sellers to cut prices.

In other cases, the effects of superstitious thinking can be life-or-death.In Chapter 1, we introduced sociologist David Phillips, who is particularly fascinated by whether the date people are born affects when they die.Phillips had previously published an article in the British Medical Journal illustrating the link between superstition and the exact time of death.In Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, and Japanese, the pronunciation of "death" and "four" are basically the same, and because of this, the number 4 has been given an "unlucky" meaning in both Chinese and Japanese cultures.Many hospitals in China do not have a 4th floor, and some Japanese people become nervous when traveling on the 4th of every month.The superstition has also spread to California, where you can choose the last four digits of your phone number when you open a store or business.Phillips noticed that at Chinese and Japanese restaurants, the number of 4s in the selected phone number was one-third less than usual, but this was not the case at American restaurants.All of this led Phillips to wonder whether the superstitious pressure brought on by the fourth of every month could have a significant impact on a person's health.For example, will it cause more people to have heart attacks?

To assess the possible health effects of these superstitions, Phillips and his research team analyzed the records of 4.7 million deaths in the United States between 1973 and 1998.They compared Chinese-American and Japanese-American dates of death with those of Caucasian Americans and found that among the Chinese-American and Japanese-American populations, more people died from heart attacks on the fourth day of the month than in the same month. 7 percent higher on any other day, rising to 13 percent when the focus is on chronic heart disease.Relatively speaking, the death rate of Caucasians in the United States does not peak on the 4th of each month.The work is controversial, and some other researchers have questioned it.Still, Phillips and his research team are convinced that something weird is happening, dubbing the phenomenon the "Charles Baskerville Effect."Charles Baskerville, a character in Arthur Conan Doyle's detective novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, died of a heart attack due to extreme psychological stress.

It's one thing for superstitious people to accidentally kill themselves, but it's quite another if their superstitious thoughts directly affect the lives of others.Thomas Scanlon and his colleagues have looked at traffic flow on Friday the 13th, the number of people in shopping malls and the number of visits to hospital emergency rooms.Over a two-year period of observation, they found that there was significantly less traffic on London's Ring 25 on Friday the 13th than on Friday the 6th, meaning that more nervous motorists may chose to stay at home.They then analyzed a variety of hospital visits over the two days, including poisonings, injuries from poisonous animals, self-injury and traffic accidents.Of all these cases, only traffic accidents showed a significant difference, with significantly more hospital visits for traffic accidents on Friday the 13th than on Friday the 6th.In fact, this difference is very obvious. On this "unlucky" day, the number of people who came to see a doctor due to traffic accidents increased by 52%.However, Scanlon and his colleagues only had access to data from one hospital, so the numbers involved in the study were relatively small, meaning their findings could also be purely coincidental.In a larger but equally controversial research project, Finnish researcher Simo Naha looked at similar records across Finland between 1971 and 1997.During this time period, there were 324 "Black Fridays" and 1,339 non-"Black Fridays".Naha's conclusions are consistent with previous research, especially for women.Just 5% of male deaths were recorded for unlucky days, but this climbed to a staggering 38% of female deaths.Both groups of researchers attribute the increase in accident rates to drivers becoming especially nervous on inauspicious days.Therefore, the conclusion is already obvious: superstition does kill people!