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Poster A8 in Poster Session A - Tuesday, August 6, 2024, 4:15 – 6:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
The Developmental of Superstitions in Uncontrollable Environment
Haoyang Lu1 (), Tianyuan Teng2, Hang Zhang1; 1Peking University, 2Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics
Superstitions are false beliefs about causality and illusory control over outcomes. Although previous research has explored factors that influence superstitious beliefs, the cognitive processes underlying their formation remain unclear. We designed a task environment allowing free exploration of a vast number of actions with uncontrollable outcomes to understand the development of superstitions over experience. Participants (N =281) played a game where they attempted to produce rewarding keypress sequences across 100 trials with randomly assigned reward contingencies, reporting perceived reward probability and controllability. We found that perceived controllability increased non-linearly with reward rates, plateauing after 50%. Reward predictions and con- controllability showed a bidirectional feedback loop, reinforcing each other. Personality traits such as superstition proneness, locus of control, and schizotypy also influenced perceived controllability. Our results delineate how superstitious beliefs emerge from an interplay between environmental reward statistics, exploratory tendencies, and psychological traits, involving distorted perceptions of causality.
Keywords: Superstitious belief Illusion of control Decision-making Reward processing