Superstition -vs- Reality By Penny Marie Have heard of noncontingent behavior or maybe operant conditioning? No? I bet you know what a superstition is. It’s all basically the same thing. B.F. Skinner was known to many in the psychology field as the father of radical behaviorism; he believed that everything psychological is based on behavior. What he did was pretty cool. In 1948 B.F. Skinner wrote an article called Superstition in the pigeon. The article was about a study he did using something called a Skinner box (conditioning chamber); his thought was that animals could be trained by using the action/consequence method. In this box he tested rats and pigeons, using food as positive reinforcement. When the animal turned a lever, it got food. Over time even when the lever wasn’t there, the animal did the same actions, and the food was given. This lead Skinner to believe that the animal was acting out of superstition rather than reality. The animal got the treat even though there was no lever
to push, but the action of turning the head or doing a dance continued. In his testing, this training worked on six of eight of the animals, and none of this behavior was present in any of the animals before testing. Skinner took this premise to another level stating that superstition was a trained behavior.
Why do we do what we do? Have you ever knocked on wood for good luck, been very cautious on Friday the 13th, or done certain things before flying? These are all trained behaviors. Most times, we have no idea where we learned the behavior or why, but it’s ingrained in our brains. Skinner says that superstitious behavior can be explained as easily as any other action by using the principals of operant conditioning. In other words, we are trained to do
these things over time. Even when there is no evidence to prove something terrible will happen if you do or don’t do these rituals.
The mind is a wonderful thing Skinner believed that this is because humans presume that there is some connection between the superstitious behavior and some type of reinforcing consequence, even though in reality, there is no proof that this is true. We believe that if we don’t knock on wood, something bad will happen, it won’t, but we think it may. Because we have knocked on wood many times and nothing bad has happened we believe it works. Skinner called this a non-contingent reinforcement, the reward is not contingent on behavior, but we think it is. This holds true for animals as well as humans. We continue to repeat the action, and a superstition is born.