Question

In 2-3 paragraphs post an example of a Superstitious belief and Ritual you or someone you know has. Using your text and Lecture 1, cite the importance and value of rituals in our society. Be sure to cite the principles of Operant Conditioning by B.F. Skinner. How does the concept of reinforcement apply to the superstitious belief and how might the superstition be maintained?

Answer 1

• Someone I know is a big sports lover especially cricket,and he definitely has the superstition of sitting on the left side of the couch while watching the match and not getting up even once.Also before starting the match he would tell everyone around to not move as well!
• I definitely wear my lucky watch when I go for a big presentation at work or even when I was in college and had my exams as well.And also I have a ritual before starting the presentation that I always hum my favourite song 5minutes before the presentation starts to settle my nervousness.
• A ritual is an action that we repeat because of its symbolic value. Religions define the rituals that believers are supposed to conduct, for example, and many of them have developed over centuries of being steeped in tradition if not religious law.
• A superstitious behavior can include rituals you engage in to produce a specific outcome. We learn superstitious behaviors through a simple reinforcement process. The basic principle behind reinforcement is that when a certain action appears to lead to a desired consequence, we repeat it.
• Most behavior we learn through reinforcement involves a reasonably straightforward process linking cause and effect. This is the basis for operant or instrumental conditioning.
• With superstitious behavior, we perform an extraneous action that happens to accompany the behavior that's truly being reinforced. Now that extraneous action the superstitious behavior itself becomes reinforced.
• The lucky watch you wore the day you gave the presentation of your life, through superstitious conditioning, now becomes immortalized as a reason for your success.
• You wish to avoid jinxing future situations, so from now on, or until it wears out completely, you won’t go near an important meeting without it.
• If for some reason the battery dies the night before one of those big occasions, you may be convinced it’s an omen that you’re doomed to fail.
• The watch, in reality, would have had little relation to your success other than perhaps helping you get to the meeting on time. And in most cases, superstitious behaviors have an even more tenuous relationship to outcomes.
  
• It is believed that underlying superstitious behavior was the uncertainty hypothesis, the notion that when people are unsure about an outcome, they try to find a way to control it.
• Games/Sports are like any unscripted situation,no one knows the results until it occurs. Although this is what makes sports so exciting, it also drives fans to distraction. They want to know the outcome, and they want that outcome to be favorable.
• But they also do know realistically that they can’t control it, and this is the crux of the superstition. When we can't control the influence of the outcome,but through our supersition we actually feel less anxious.
• Accidental reinforcement of a response can lead to superstitious behaviour. Skinner demonstrated the conditioning of such behaviour using pigeons. He set the dispenser to deliver food to animals in an operant chamber at fixed time intervals, for example every 15 minutes.
• The pigeons associated whatever behaviour they were engaging in at the time of the food being dispensed with the delivery of the food. The likelihood of those behaviours occuring then increased. Skinner conditioned pigeons to spin around in circles, nod their heads, or to make swaying motions.