Superstition Is Not Limited To Human!

In 1948, there was an experiment by B.F. Skinner that showed that pigeons appeared to exhibit superstitious behaviors.


Full paper is here.


I think the result might be applicable to why human perform rituals, pray, bribe karma wheel, buy lotteries, etc. I also wonder whether animals have their religious thoughts too.


I like to collect these animal examples because, based on what we learn from animal and human behaviors, I believe that biology created human morals and religions through evolution of societal units and it's up to the us, not supernatural mechanisms, to make sure that bad deeds got punished and good deeds got rewarded. I don't believe that human require special treatment from nature in terms of mechanisms that shaped us.


A few books that shaped my thinking about this matter:

• Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes
• Peacemaking among Primates
• Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition
• Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong
• Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration
• The Evolution of Cooperation

In the last book, bacteria show cooperative behaviors that might be examples of what we would call moral behaviors. That book, along with The Blind Watchmaker started my education in evolution.

Sometimes Experts Don't Know Much

The Rosenhan experiment showed that psychiatric hospital staff couldn't reliably distinguish between the sane and the insane in the hospital. The full paper can be found here.

According to another study at Cornell, you can implant false memories into preschool children to make them think the memories are true, and experts cannot distinguish, by interviewing the children, which memories are true and which are false.

So, when experts' claims conflict with reality, you should be careful in checking whether the claims are true or not. Most people (yes, including me) appear (or pretend) to know more than they actually know.

--- - ---- - ----- ---------
P.S. How to believe anything? That's a hard question that cannot be completely solved. I think we can only hope to converge closer and closer to the truth. Gotama Buddha tried to teach the Kalamas people using the list we know as Kalama Sutra. Personally, I like the Bayesian approach of updating my belief on whether something is true or false as I gain more and more evidences. A short overview of Bayesian inference is here. A reading list can be found here.