It's Religion -v- Reality

Is all I'm saying. I'll often joke that cheering on my town's professional sports teams is my Religion. That's simply because it's the exactly same type of belief system and I totally let m'self become quite emotionally tied-up in the outcomes of their games. The difference being, I have no problem acknowledging how silly my beliefs in this regard really and empirically are.

Since the religious beliefs with which I was raised showed just as much efficacy in providing a good life pour moi and, in fact, did a whole lot more towards stripping away my natural ability to earn and feel confidence and self-respect, I was lucky enough to be able to let those go.

Intellectually anyhow . . .

The Sports beliefs? Meh. . . I shed 'em when I'm sick of my teams' abundance of poor performances, then I welcome them back when it looks like there's an empirically decent chance that those teams have done their prep-work and are actually gonna make a run for being, on the Scoreboard, what they are in my heart and mind: the Best.

A Game of Magical Thinking Leaves Reality on the Sidelines
By Shankar Vedantam
Monday, February 5, 2007; Page A02

-snip-

A sports event such as the Super Bowl is a perfect venue to examine a phenomenon that influences many aspects of life: Large numbers of people regularly display signs of magical thinking -- they believe they have influenced distant events or can sense connections between things that have no known physical connection.

Have you ever told yourself that something you want very much would happen if the next three traffic lights turned green as you drove down the road? Have you ever forgone a warranty on an expensive new electronic gizmo and then worried about whether your decision would cause the gizmo to fail? Have you ever worn a lucky shirt to a big game?

Many people, of course, explicitly believe in the paranormal, but that is not what we are talking about. What interests psychologists such as Pronin is that people hold fast to beliefs in magical powers even as they explicitly say the beliefs do not make sense.

"It points to the question of how we can be of two minds," said Jane Risen, a social psychology graduate student at Cornell University who has conducted experiments on magical thinking. "You believe something is true even as you know it is false. When you invoke a rational mind-set, you know one thing, but we still have these intuitions that lead us to something very different."

When it comes to sports, magical thinking is merely funny. We implore the TV set to do our bidding and mightily exert our will to get an opposing team to make a mistake. But such thinking is less funny elsewhere in life: Magical thinking gets people to waste money on unnecessary insurance -- buying expensive warranties on products that are unlikely to fail because they believe not buying insurance will make it more likely that the product will fail. And once people buy insurance, magical thinking prompts them to handle it carelessly because they believe they are unlikely to face a problem.

[To read the rest, repeat 3 times: "Open Sesame!" (or just click here, eh...)]