The Price of Luck in China

A preference for lucky numbers costs Chinese consumers the equivalent of $6 billion per year -- a little more than 1 percent of the country's entire gross domestic product. So says Zili Yang, a professor of economics at SUNY-Binghampton.

Like American travelers who avoid the 13th floor in hotels, Chinese shoppers tend to avoid anything beginning or ending with the number 4 -- si in Chinese, a homophone for "death." It's no coincidence, for example, that the Encore hotel in Las Vegas skips Floors 40 through 49; Chinese high-rollers won't take those rooms. On the other hand, 8 (ba in Chinese, which sounds like fa, meaning "prosperity") and 6 (a word suggesting smoothness) are widely considered lucky.

According to Yang, retailers in China simply jack up their prices to avoid 4 as the first or last digit. Yang analyzed prices for more than 11,000 Beijing area products, including food, electronics, and clothing. He found 8 statistically over-represented and 4 under-represented. "The use of superstitious numbers in pricing and the exploitation of superstition in retail sales is more than a cultural phenomenon," Yang concludes. "Given its ubiquity, the use of superstitious numbers in prices should not be viewed as a mere marketing gimmick, either."

Visitation

Lampshade Jesus, Feb 24, 2012.

Jesus appeared in my family room the other night. If you don't believe me, then just take a close look at this photo, snapped by my daughter's boyfriend. (Thanks, Justin!) Pay attention to the lampshade in the foreground.  Notice the lower part of Jesus' face? See the dark outline of his neatly trimmed beard and mustache? Of course you do!

You see Jesus because your mind is hard-wired to recognize patterns, especially faces. Studies have shown that one-hour-old infants will follow pretty much anything that looks vaguely like face, so long as it has two eyes on top of a nose. A simple circle with two dots aligned horizontally over one dot in the center (a smiley face without the smile) will do to catch a newborn's attention.

What does all this have to do with superstition? Only that we continually seek patterns -- not just perceptually, but cognitively as well. We can't help it. Whether it's Jesus in a lampshade, camels in clouds, or  lucky sweaters before a test, our brains make connections to interpret our experiences.

Unfortunately, Lampshade Jesus vanishes whenever you change the lighting in my family room or change your angle of vision -- not like, say, the grilled-cheese sandwich bearing an image of the Virgin Mary "found" by a Florida Woman in 1994. Ten years later, the online casino GoldenPalace.com bought it for $28,000.    

Courage Under Fire

Three on a match: serious stuff

Superstitions and rituals flourish during wartime. Like sailors, gamblers, and athletes, soldiers going into combat must learn to live with uncertainty and chance -- except in a soldier's case, chance can get you killed.

"I'm not a superstitious man," British Major Richard Streatfield told the BBC two years ago, just before returning from service with NATO forces in Afghanistan. "But as this tour progressed, I've noticed that there is an increasingly superstitious element that has crept in. I've listened to the same piece of music every night for the last three months." He tells of fellow Brits wearing talismans and a platoon commander putting on his boots in the same order every day. "Inexplicable," says Streatfield, "except for the fact that it has become his ritual. There are a hundred more -- the small rituals  of those who need everything to be on their side."

Facing the chaos of combat, soldiers do everything possible to control what is in their power to control. They clean, maintain, and prep their equipment as if their lives depended on it, because their lives do depend on it. They rely on their training. They trust their brothers in arms. But they also know that their survival often depends on sheer dumb luck, and for that they turn to ritual. For them, superstition becomes a way to cope with stress and to cultivate the illusion of control. It's no laughing matter. It's what keeps them going, day after day.

I don't know whether Corporal Jaime Pilcher has studied psychology, but the military convoy driver offered an insightful explanation of his superstitious rituals to the American Forces Network in Afghanistan.  "When you're going on a mission, you're always thinking about the worst," he says. "So if you come back from a successful mission, nothing happening, you basically try and repeat that. I get in my truck the same way. I listen to the same song."

Do soldiers truly believe that their talismans and rituals protect them? It doesn't matter. And if you asked them, I'm not sure whether they could tell you honestly. Talismans and rituals are tools, just like rifles and MREs, and they're trusted until they fail.

During the first Gulf War, Giora Keinan of the University of Tel Aviv studied Israeli civilians who endured Saddam Hussein's Scud missile attacks -- random death falling out of the sky almost every night. Like soldiers, many of them turned to superstitious rituals and magical thinking to cope with the stress. "It is of interest to note," concluded Keinan, "that persons who hold magical beliefs or who engage in magical rituals are often aware that their thoughts, actions, or both are unreasonable and irrational. Despite this awareness, they are unable to rid themselves of this behavior." I have to ask: under the circumstances, why would they want to?

No. 13 and the Bottom Line (Pt. 2)

Triskaidekaphobia seems to have an economic impact that reaches beyond the travel, tourism, and hotel industries. In Ireland, Michael Healy-Rae (a member of the Teachta Dala, or Irish parliament) has proposed the changing that country's entire automobile registration system before 2013. He fears that superstitious buyers might put off new-car purchases for 12 full months to avoid getting stuck with the number 13 on their license plates.

Healy-Rae raised the possibility after hearing from car dealers who've already started to worry about next year's sales. Apparently, the Society for the Irish Motor Industry (SIMI) supports his idea. A slumping economy has devastated auto sales, which have dropped from 180,000 units per year to about 75,000. "Even if it was 5 percent of the people [who opted against buying a 2013 car], in a market of 75,000 [new cars per year] that would be a real problem," a SIMI spokesman told a leading Irish newspaper.

In this case, personal superstitions might drive not only economic demand, but also public policy.

No. 13 and the Bottom Line (Pt. 1)

Today marks the one-month anniversary of the Costa Concordia disaster. In January, on Friday the 13th,  the Italian cruise ship ran aground off the Tuscan coast only hours after it had left the port of Civitavecchia; 17 people died in the ensuing chaos, and 15 others remain missing and presumed dead.

By putting to sea on a Friday the 13th, the Concordia defied a longstanding tradition in the industry. Cruise lines generally avoid setting out  voyages on that "unlucky" day -- not because they're superstitious, but because so many discretionary travelers are. It's a tough ticket to sell.

For the same reason, most hotels don't have a floor numbered 13. They'll put a restaurant between 12 and 14, or the spa, or the fitness center, and call it "Restaurant Level" or "M" or anything but its proper number. Even guests who don't claim to be superstitious would prefer to book a room on another floor, so why waste the space? Otis Elevator claims that 85% of the commercial properties in which it installs equipment don't have a floor numbered 13.

More than a mere personal quirk, triskaidekaphobia drives demand for certain goods and services -- and those providers recognize and accommodate it, rather than letting it affect their bottom line.

Charms 'R Us

Kids live by superstitions. Step on a crack, break your mother's back. Blow the seeds of a dandelion, make your wishes come true. Cross your fingers for good luck.

With children's lives so rife with ritual, do we really need to give them more? But that's exactly what two psychologists at the University of Kansas did with a bunch of preschoolers back in the 1980s.  Gregory Wagner and Edward Morris rounded up a dozen kids, raging in age from 3 to 6 years,  to see whether they could condition superstition.

One by one, Wagner and Morris ushered the kids went into a tiny room, no bigger that a closet, specially built for the experiment. Against one of the walls stood a pint-size mechanical clown named Bobo, who dropped marbles out of his mouth into a chute.  The kids were told to catch the marbles and collect them in a box. If they collected enough marbles by the end of the session, explained the researchers, they could choose one of the 50-cent plastic animals from a collection on display outside the room.

"Sometimes Bobo will give you marbles, and sometimes Bobo won't give you marbles," the researchers told the kids. But they didn't tell the kids that Bobo would or would not give out marbles regardless of what the kids did. In fact, Bobo would spit marbles at regular intervals (every 15 or 30 seconds, depending on the session), like clockwork.

So,Wagner and Morris left a 4-, 5-, or 6-year-old alone in a closet with a marble-gobbing clown for 10 minutes at a time, while they and their colleagues watched through a two-way mirror and videotaped what happened.  And what happened was this: at least 7 of the 12 kids apparently came to believe that they could influence Bobo. They spontaneously tried various stunts -- making faces, touching or kissing the clown's big red nose, patting its cheeks with one or both hands, wriggling their hips back or forth, or even shimmying as if they were spinning an invisible hula-hoop. And if the clown happened to deliver immediately after a particular performance, the kid would repeat the performance and keep repeating it -- expecting to get a marble, connecting his or her ritual with the reward.

"In summary," Wagner and Morris concluded, "the present study...produced behavior similar to that which has been called 'superstitious.'" Kids as young as three and half looked for patterns between their behavior and external events,  found them, and inferred a cause-effect relationship -- albeit a specious one.

Well, most of them did. Three of the children did so little inside the room that the researchers couldn't really tell whether they were acting superstitiously. One little girl simply sat there and smiled. And one five-year-old boy just sucked his thumb. Wagner and Morris didn't note whether these two kids bothered to collect any marbles. But it doesn't matter, because everyone got a toy in end.

Operators Are Standing By

A collection of Russian Orthodox icons.

This week, The Moscow Times reports that the Russian Orthodox Church plans to open an "anti-superstition hot line" to set callers straight on the difference between superstition and religion. Staffed by trained theologians, the free service aims to clarify practices officially sanctioned by the church. "We want people to be able to get to a clear response with no superstition, which arises as a result of ignorance," said a church spokesperson. The church will make the hot line available throughout Russia if it succeeds in the Moscow test market.

It's about time. We've had psychic hot lines for a long while. Why not superstition hot lines?  

Aside from sounding like a great premise for a Saturday Night Live skit with Father Guido or the Church Lady ("Who you gonna call? Spellbusters!"), the Russian phone-in service strikes me as a fascinating ecclesiastical departure. Like most organized religions, Christianity has historically co-opted or absorbed folklore and superstition from various cultures, leading to richly diverse religious practices. Think of how the ancient Britons' ritual animal sacrifices evolved into All-Hallows' Eve (Halloween) in England, or the Aztecs' memorials to their ancestors became the Day of the Dead in Meso-America. I wonder why the Russian Orthodox Church now feels so threatened by what it calls superstition.