A psychologist from the United States found an explanation for a person's irrational belief in false omens and supernatural forces by the fact that our brain recognizes irrational thoughts using one area, and corrects them with a completely different group of nerve cells.
A person's tendency to believe in supernatural forces and phenomena, even when their nature was refuted right before his eyes, is explained by the fact that one region of his brain recognizes irrational thoughts in our brain, and a completely different area for their correction, writes the psychologist in an article in journal Psychological Review.
“Even when all conditions are ideal for a person to notice a mistake in their reasoning, and when a person has all the motivation and ability to behave rationally, magical intuition still wins,” says Jane Risen of University of Chicago (USA).
As Reisen explains, she began researching the issue after she became interested in the behavior of sports fans. Many of them are quite rational and even unbelievers, but when it comes to the matches of their favorite team, almost every fan has their own set of rituals and accepts, to which they attribute supernatural powers.
Reisen tried to uncover the roots of these superstitions, the absurdity of which people are fully aware of and, nevertheless, continue to believe in them, observing the behavior of several such people and trying to describe the work of their psyche using a mathematical model.
As the psychologist explains, a person is able to think, figuratively speaking, in two ways - "fast" and "slow". Under the first concept, scientists mean intuitive thinking, which allows us to quickly and easily get out of life situations and make momentary decisions, and under the second - a more energy-consuming way of thinking, which basically works by correcting mistakes of the first.
According to Reisen, the very fact that superstitions continue to dominate the human mind even if he understands their fallacy, suggests that not one, but two brain regions are responsible for the work of "slow" thinking.
The first one is responsible for recognizing errors, and the second one for correcting them. The connection between them can be influenced by those parts of the brain that are responsible for the work of the sense of intuition, interfering with the exchange of information between them.
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This, Reisen believes, explains why many sports fans are extremely superstitious and why managers in large companies often make irrational decisions.