Superstitious Beliefs and Counterfactual Thought

SUPERSTITIOUS BELIEFS AND COUNTERFACTUAL THOUGHT

We propose that there are two routes by which the counterfactual thoughts generated by a highly mutable event sequence can foster superstitious beliefs pertaining to that sequence. The first implicates memory distortion. The greater incidence of “if only” thoughts following ill-fated mutable actions might serve to make these events more available in memory and hence more subjectively probable. This hypothesis links the two processes that Tversky and Kahneman (1973) described in their original formulation of the availability heuristic: the process by which events become available in memory and the process by which events become available in imagination. We propose that event sequences that yield highly available alternative constructions tend also to be highly available in memory.

The second account for how counterfactual thoughts might affect people’s decision strategies draws attention not to people’s recollection of the past, but to their contemplation of the future. People’s reluctance to engage in actions easily imagined otherwise need not reflect distorted estimates of the likelihood that misfortune will follow such actions (their subjective expectancies). Such reluctance could simply reflect the regret they anticipate experiencing should misfortune occur (their subjective utilities). The force of the omen against matador substitution, for instance, might stem not from the belief that bad things are more likely to happen when you do so, but from the belief that any bad thing that does happen will be psychologically more painful. Certainly, Yiyo’s death seems to derive much of its poignancy from its circumstances. In effect, this hypothesis proposes that the postcomputed thoughts to which easily undoable events give rise (Kahneman & Miller, 1986) are sometimes anticipated – precomputed, if you will.

Separating the respective roles played by anticipatory regret and memory distortion in the development of superstitious beliefs is difficult because the two processes so often operate in tandem. Thus, people facing the prospect of loss tend to refrain from taking highly mutable actions both because they anticipate the aversive counterfactual thoughts that such actions could yield and because they better remember sequences in which similar actions led to negative outcomes. Nevertheless, we contend it is important to distinguish empirically and conceptually between these two processes, and we endeavor to do so in the present chapter. We first consider the biased-memory hypothesis.