A new study published today reveals how fortune telling, a popular form of superstition affects people’s behaviors.
Although superstition has an impact on people, including men who claim not to believe in it, new research shows that it has a much less impact on women.
In three recent research, men who were given a favorable fortune-telling outcome as opposed to a neutral or unfavorable one were thereafter more likely to take financial risks; this association was much less strong for women.
These results were published in PLOS ONE today by Xiaoyue Tan of Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and colleagues.
Superstitious behaviors and beliefs are widespread throughout the world. Science is learning more about superstitions thanks to a small but growing body of research.
Superstitious practices, for instance, may improve individuals’ performance on tasks by boosting their confidence. Evidence also suggests that superstition can help people deal with feelings of uncertainty.
Although it is a common sort of superstition, few studies have looked at how fortune telling affects people’s behavior.
Tan and his colleagues ran two online experiments with a total of 693 people who were given either positive, negative, or neutral predictions about their lives and future financial success. They did this to learn more about how fortune telling affects how people act.
Later, the participants filled out a questionnaire to find out how likely they were to take financial risks. In these trials, those who were lucky at the start took more financial risks than those who weren’t, especially the men.
Next, in a lab experiment with 193 new people, it was found that getting good luck made people more likely to gamble with real money in an online gambling game. But here, there wasn’t a big difference between men and women.
After completing their statistical “meta-analysis” of all three tests, the researchers found a statistically significant correlation between men’s financial risk-taking with favorable versus unfavorable fortune. For women, this connection was essentially nonexistent.
Despite the fact that the results of all three tests seem to have had an effect on the participants’ actions, the majority of participants in each experiment claimed not to believe in fortune telling.
This is consistent with earlier studies that show people act on superstition even when they pretend not to. Future studies could examine the subtleties of these results, such as the causes of the more significant impacts on men.
“Positive fortune telling,” according to the authors, “can yield increased financial risk-taking in men, but not (or less so) in women.”
Source: 10.1371/journal.pone.0273233
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