Let me spare you the suspense: we believe in superstition because we have decided to believe in it. Everything else just snowballed from there.

Allow me to explain.

Hyundai Everywhere
Four years ago, I rented a Hyundai Elantra for a trip. Not that I chose it specifically; I just chose a price range and the price range chose the Elantra. Nevertheless, I accepted it, the trip was awesome…but that’s not the point.

The point is, after I got back from the trip, I noticed Hyundai Elantras. E-ve-ry-where.

I didn’t see them before. Some reasons: Either a) before that, all Elantras were painted to match the background thus making them invisible; or b) because I was such a trendsetter—after I rented one, there was a sudden interest in them.

Both theories suck. I made them up, obviously.

So what really happened?

It turned out that the Elantras were indeed “invisible”. To me, at least.

There’s this thing I would like to call selective recognition. If we were to pay attention to every information received by our senses, we will be overwhelmed by the massive amount of information. Instead, our brain filters, cross-checks and selects information worthy of our attention.

Who provides the filter? It is you, mostly.

If you’re an accountant, you would notice the KPMG headquarters you’ve just passed by. To your friends who couldn’t care less about anything accounting & auditing, the building would just be another building.

It would be invisible.

You might have this experience: once you bought or really want to buy something, you see it everywhere. In fact, you cannot not see it.

So, the only reason I saw Hyundai Elantras everywhere was because I’ve rented one.

The insignificant, faceless, invisible Elantras had been given a meaning (i.e. the trip) which allowed me to recognise it from a sea of cars. Well, at least while the meaning was still there.

Once I forgot about the trip, Elantras became invisible again.

iPod Even
In an iPod Shuffle, the songs are played in… why, shuffle mode, of course. The shuffle function should, in theory, select songs at random and play them.

In reality however, some songs are played more frequent than others. Some are played even before all songs are completed.

This seems to contradicts the notion of random selection of songs, right?

As you might have guessed (because our readers are very smart and intelligent), it is wrong.

That’s the way it is supposed to work. Random is not even.

In fact, even is the opposite of random. To be even, the iPod should choose the songs carefully as to not play the same song again without completing the playlist first. It couldn’t just select and play randomly.

Some iPod Shuffle owners have pointed out this “broken” feature. The more superstitious ones even decided that their iPods have preferences. They’ve decided to give their otherwise lifeless device a personality.

They have decided to believe in this superstition.

Of course, they’ve given some meaning to this particular situation – the iPod Shuffle prefer particular songs. On top of that, they believe in it and hate to be proven wrong. These compounded reasons trigger their selective recognition to quickly point out “See, I told you. The damn thing really loves Bohemian Rhapsody” whenever a “preferred” song is played.

And yes, those moment when “other songs” came up were easily ignored.

Stickiness factor
If we decided to believe in something—due to bias because we want to be right— those instances that we’re wrong will soon be forgotten; while those “See, I’m right” moments stick.

What worse is that, as in the iPod Shuffle case, we’ll miss the wrongs more than the rights.

This stickiness factor is the self-reinforcing loop that will only convince us of our original belief.

Forget the iPod Shuffle, extrapolate this to just about every superstition you can think of and you might find this loop.

Until we’re aware of this loop and question everything we know about what we know, we’ll always fall into this loop.

And that, my friend, is why we believe in superstition.