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[7] The Oxford English Dictionary [8] describes them as "irrational, unfounded", Merriam-Webster as "a false conception about causation or belief or practice", [9] and the Cambridge Dictionary as "sans grounding in human reason or scientific knowledge". [10] This notion of superstitious practices is not causally related to the outcomes. [11]
These beliefs can cause a person to experience an irrational fear of performing certain acts or having certain thoughts because of an assumed correlation between doing so and threatening calamities. [1] In psychiatry, magical thinking defines false beliefs about the capability of thoughts, actions or words to cause or prevent undesirable events ...
[1] [2] Often, it arises from ignorance, a misunderstanding of science or causality, a belief in fate or magic, or fear of that which is unknown. It is commonly applied to beliefs and practices surrounding luck , prophecy , and certain spiritual beings, particularly the belief that future events can be foretold by specific (apparently ...
"Superstitions come from traditions and your upbringing — people teach you superstitions; you're not born believing in Friday the 13th or that if you step on a crack, you'll break your mother's ...
Even in this age of science, superstitions die hard, and even the most rational of us sometimes believe in omens. Today, eclipses retain a little bit of their historic role as harbingers of doom.
Shermer explores the psychology of scholars and business men who give up their careers in their pursuit to broadcast their paranormal beliefs. In his last chapter, added to the revised version, Shermer explains why he believes that "intelligent people" can be more susceptible to believing in weird things than others.
Set in 1978, in a Kurdish village high in the mountains, Iranian horror entry “Zalava” pits rational, scientific beliefs against superstition and groupthink, a theme that carries a lot of ...
In contrast, the “bad science” model claims that primitive man is rational, and magical beliefs come into existence as he tries to explain puzzling phenomena without enough information. According to this theory, the magician is an early form of scientist who merely lacks adequate data.