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.