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You say you are a skeptic, but do you touch wood for luck or avoid hotel rooms on the thirteenth floor? Would you cross the path of a black cat or step under a ladder? OK, perhaps you would, but lots of other people deploy these superstitions. Despite the dominance of science in today’s world, superstitious beliefs — both traditional and new—remain surprisingly popular. The concept of superstition has existed for millennia, and some of today’s most popular superstitions had their beginnings in ancient Babylonia. What explains their enduring appeal? Psychologist and author Stuart Vyse will try to explain it all for you — both the origins of many popular superstitions and the psychology that keeps them alive.
Stuart Vyse is a behavioral scientist, teacher, and writer. He is a contributing editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, where he writes the “Behavior & Belief” column, both online and in print. His first book, Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition, won the William James Book Award of the American Psychological Association and was translated into Japanese, German, and Romanian. An updated edition was published in 2014. His 2008 book, Going Broke: Why Americans (Still) Can’t Hold On To Their Money, was an analysis of the challenges of personal debt. The first edition was translated into Chinese, and the second edition was released in September of 2018 in both paperback and audiobook formats. In 2020, he published Superstition, a volume in the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series. The Spanish translation, Breve historian de la superstición, was published by Alianza editorial on January 13 (!), 2022, and Chinese and Danish translations are forthcoming. His latest book, The Uses of Delusion: Why It’s Not Always Rational to be Rational (Oxford, 2022), is out now in hardcover, e-book, and audiobook and has been released in Chinese by China Times (Taiwan). Vyse taught at Providence College, the University of Rhode Island, and Connecticut College, and he is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the Association for Psychological Science and has achieved a 10/10 score from Room Rater.
Author Stuart Vyse of Stonington, at the Stonington Free Library, Thursday, July 14, 2022.(Tim Martin/Photo)