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Conference Paper

The Development of Superstitions in Uncontrollable Environment

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Teng,  T       
Department of Computational Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Lu, H., Teng, T., & Zhang, H. (2024). The Development of Superstitions in Uncontrollable Environment. In 2024 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000F-C0F2-6
Abstract
Superstitions are false beliefs about causality and illu- sory control over outcomes. Although previous research has explored factors that influence superstitious beliefs, the cognitive processes underlying their formation re- main unclear. We designed a task environment allow- ing 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 reward- ing keypress sequences across 100 trials with randomly assigned reward contingencies, reporting perceived re- ward probability and controllability. We found that per- ceived controllability increased non-linearly with reward rates, plateauing after 50%. Reward predictions and con- trollability showed a bidirectional feedback loop, reinforc- ing each other. Personality traits such as superstition proneness, locus of control, and schizotypy also influ- enced 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.