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KIPAX

KIPAX

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KIPAX Lancashire UK
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Midnight.. thats another friday the 13th gone :)


althuogh.... personally I dont believe good/bad luck can be effected by a date or a cat or a ladder or a mirror..etc


You?
 
I wasn;t superstitious until yesterday. :eek:
 
Mammals are programmed to be superstitious -you can easily demonstrate this in rats with various experiments.

It's really useful for making quick connections - eat poisonous berries, have bad stomach, avoid eating berries.

However - supposing it was actually a bacterium you picked up two days ago that gave you the bad stomach - you avoid perfectly decent berries for the wrong reason!

We are programmed to be superstitious, but it is, of course, utter nonsense!

Phil
 
KIPAX said:
Midnight.. thats another friday the 13th gone :)


althuogh.... personally I dont believe good/bad luck can be effected by a date or a cat or a ladder or a mirror..etc


You?
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Today...I have driven, walked miles, eaten wife's food :D, drank wwwaaayyyy too much, and more...nowt...sat here thinking, 'Come one Friday 13th...give me your best!".

Nowt.

Only 364 days to wait.

philthejuggler said:
Mammals are programmed to be superstitious
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Hi, Phil (genuine question :D) I'd be interested in seeing some evidence :thumbs:

Cheers.
 
KIPAX said:
Surely thats not superstition? thats action and reaction?
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Yes, but reaction to the wrong action is superstition. The animal might avoid those berries for ever more not realising that it was something else that caused the problem.

Just like when people say 'bad things come in threes' - and then scratch around for a third slightly bad thing to make the set of three, or conveniently ignore the fourth and fifth bad-ish things that have happened!
 
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posiview said:
Hi, Phil (genuine question :D) I'd be interested in seeing some evidence :thumbs:

Cheers.
Click to expand...

I remember doing it in my Psychology degree.

You put a rat in a box with a lever. When it trips over the lever a food pellet is delivered. It soon learns to hit the lever repeatedly.

If, however, you put in a delay between the hitting of the lever and the delivery of the food the rat seems to 'think' that some other behaviour has to be added to the lever press before the food is delivered.

You end up with rats turning circles before pressing the lever - effectively this is superstitious behaviour because the food would come out anyway, but they have wrongly associated other complex behaviours with the outcome.
 
I don't believe all this being superstitious stuff . . . touch wood. :D
 
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We as humans are a pretty stupid bunch. We believe in superstition like this and then conveniently filter out truths to support our baseless theories.

Like if you had a bad day yesterday, or something bad happened. We immediately attribute it to Friday the 13th, not the fact that Dave from Accounts was a complete plum and left a big box in your way, causing you to trip up :p
 
I didn't realise it was Friday 13 yesterday, but nothing bad happened to me anyway. I'm not superstitious and I wouldn't have expected it to.

Rats are intelligent. Sampling small quanitities of unknown foods first, and avoiding foods that have made them sick in the past, is learned behaviour. It's got nothing to do with superstition.
 
MartynK said:
Rats are intelligent. Sampling small quanitities of unknown foods first, and avoiding foods that have made them sick in the past, is learned behaviour. It's got nothing to do with superstition.
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Laboratory studies have shown rats are susceptible to superstitious behaviour by 'learning' incorrectly.
 
philthejuggler said:
Yes, but reaction to the wrong action is superstition. The animal might avoid those berries for ever more not realising that it was something else that caused the problem.

Just like when people say 'bad things come in threes' - and then scratch around for a third slightly bad thing to make the set of three, or conveniently ignore the fourth and fifth bad-ish things that have happened!
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I'm with KIPAX, if a rat avoids eating something because of something it associates with in it's past it is just being wrongly cautious.
If however other rats and subsequent generations of rats avoid eating the berries, that is superstition.
 
I had a major meeting with a customer yesterday. When he suggested the date I will admit I did think about whether it would all go wrong on the day.

Meeting went well, but the drive home from Birmingham was a different story...
 
I'll dig out the rat reference, but here is is similar thing with pigeons.....

"One of Skinner's experiments examined the formation of superstition in one of his favorite experimental animals, the pigeon. Skinner placed a series of hungry pigeons in a cage attached to an automatic mechanism that delivered food to the pigeon "at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird's behavior." He discovered that the pigeons associated the delivery of the food with whatever chance actions they had been performing as it was delivered, and that they subsequently continued to perform these same actions."
 
Surely that's just instinct learned by association. It would only become superstition if the ritual was conveyed to other pigeons who had not been present at the experiment.
 
nilagin said:
Surely that's just instinct learned by association. It would only become superstition if the ritual was conveyed to other pigeons who had not been present at the experiment.
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Superstition is a belief In causality when none exists - for example, believing smashing a mirror causes bad luck or that doing a few turns causes a pellet to appear in a Skinner box.

My whole point is that superstitions are instincts learned by incorrect associations. It matters not whether these incorrect associations come from personal experiences or folk-tales from others.

As a species there are very good reasons why we make connections between events and outcomes but many many times the connections are spurious and we invent 'Fri 13th', 'angels' or homeopathy etc to try and explain the spurious connections.

Despite science being a good tool for dispelling the myths, even scientists make spurious connections confusing coincidence with causality.
 
I had to go to Wales yesterday :gag:

One of those little towns with narrow streets, double yellow lines everywhere and no parking. Eventually parked up a long way from the house I had to visit and I swear the streets both to and from the house were up hill. How do they do that :shrug:
 
2blue4u said:
I had to go to Wales yesterday :gag:

One of those little towns with narrow streets, double yellow lines everywhere and no parking. Eventually parked up a long way from the house I had to visit and I swear the streets both to and from the house were up hill. How do they do that :shrug:
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Welcome to Wales. We mine the hills quick to make the foreigners think the are always going up hill till they head home.
 
posiview said:
Today...I have driven, walked miles, eaten wife's food :D, drank wwwaaayyyy too much, and more...nowt...sat here thinking, 'Come one Friday 13th...give me your best!".

Nowt.
Only 364 days to wait.

Hi, Phil (genuine question :D) I'd be interested in seeing some evidence :thumbs:

Cheers.
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Afraid not ............... December 13, 2013 is a Friday :lol:
 
The corresponding day out here is Tuesday 13th. It past last month incident free.
 
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