Superstition

I own two Houston Astros shirts. I wore one last week on the day of the first ALDS game. I wore the second one the next day. Then they were in the laundry until the day before game 5. After washing them, I remembered the game and put one on. The Astros won the three games when I was wearing an Astros shirt and lost the two games I was not. This pattern continued into the ALCS games this weekend.

Now, there is zero cause and effect going one here. My choice in apparel has no affect on a major league baseball team. But when I noticed this pattern it got me thinking about superstition.

There are so many things in the world that we don’t understand and can’t control. It can be scary and overwhelming to think about. Human’s are always looking for patterns with which we can use to wrestle some small part of control over our the uncontrollable. When we recognize some insignificant pattern, we want it to be true.

Humanity has lots of silly cultural superstitions. Most of which we all acknowledge as ridiculous. Black cats, the number 13, broken mirrors etc etc. But all of these originated somewhere. Someone at some point had a really bad series of luck after breaking a mirror.  The difference between that person and any one of us is frequency.

If I keep wearing Astros shirts on game days, eventually they will lose.  But how often do you break a mirror? Once every 7 years? We all have bad things happen to us. Nothing we can do to prevent all misfortune.

We recognize that. But our minds still notice the inconsequential patterns. They nudge us. And then we end up doing ridiculous things just for that slim chance that maybe, just maybe, we’ve figured out the secret to the universe.