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We Can All Share in the Luck of the Irish
We all have our lucky charms. Whether it’s a four leaf clover, rabbit’s foot, or that “lucky” T-shirt we can’t seem to part with, our charms are with us in times of need. Superstitions may
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Brandishing our inner talisman
Mexicans call it mal de ojo, and in Brazil it’s olho gordo. Turks call it the Eye of Medusa and ward it off with the ubiquitous talisman called nazar. American Jews use the Yiddish phrase
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How lucky charms really work
Wade Boggs, the former Red Sox slugger and third baseman, was very ritualistic about his warm-ups. For night games, he took batting practice at precisely 5:17 and ran wind sprints at exactly 7:17. He fielded
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Predictable Peckers
The entertaining article, “The Many Lives of Superstition” (Observer, October 2008), promotes an erroneous interpretation of superstitious behavior by attributing it to accidental pairings of a response with a reinforcing stimulus (i.e., response-reinforcer contiguity). This
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The Many Lives of Superstition
We’re nearing the end of a long campaign season in which every factor under the sun has come into play: Issues of age, race, gender, experience/inexperience. Round and round it goes, how it ends, nobody
