We investigate a superstition for which adherence is nearly universal.
Using a combination of field interventions that involve unsuspecting participants and a lab-style value elicitation, we measure the strength of peoples’ underlying preferences, and to what extent their behavior is driven by social conformity rather than the superstition itself. Our findings indicate that both mechanisms influence behavior. While a substantial number of people are willing to incur a relatively high individual cost in order to adhere to the superstition, for many, adherence is contingent on the behavior of others.
Our findings suggest that it is the conforming nature of the majority that sustains the false beliefs of the minority.
[Keywords: conformity, field experiment, lab-in-the-field, superstition]
…The Superstition: “Via Sarfatti 25” is the oldest building of classrooms at Bocconi University, and most lectures are held there. The entrance is broad, with 3 adjacent passageways. The middle passageway is separated from the adjacent lateral ones by 2 columns, each of which is fronted by a statue of a lion. A widely known refrain, after which the campus newspaper “Tra i Leoni” is named, has it that “One who passes between the lions, will not graduate at Bocconi”, which is a translation from the Italian original seen above. Accordingly, students almost universally shun the middle passageway, opting instead for one of the 2 lateral passageways. The impact on the flow of students in and out is stark. Fewer than 1 in 20 people entering or exiting the building pass between the lions, and the ones who do are almost invariably faculty or foreign exchange students.
-
…Study 1 involves a field intervention in which we block off one of the 2 lateral passageways, thereby increasing the cost of indulging the superstition.
-
Study 2 involves another field intervention, conducted during an evacuation drill. The evacuation drill offered an alternative approach to ruling out the shortest-path confound as the drill imposed considerable waiting cost on those exiting through the lateral passageways. Further, we sent groups of student confederates, with whom we had contracted, to walk through the middle passageway. The purpose was to reduce the cost of walking through the middle passageway for any student affected by explanation 2. We measure the degree to which our intervention caused more students to walk through the middle.
-
Study 3, which combines lab and field features, quantifies the strength of students’ aversion to walking between the lions, and uses different treatments to further evaluate relevance of explanations 1 and 2. Using a simple and novel adaptation of the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak method ( et al 1964), we elicit the students willingness-to-accept money in exchange for agreeing to walk through the lions. Depending on treatment, they were informed either that they would walk “alone” or “together with the others that accept”.
…The results of Study 2 demonstrate that some students who behave in accordance with the superstitious rule will violate it if they observe other students near them doing so. This indicates that for these students, the aversion to walking between the lions is unrelated to a superstitious belief. Furthermore, because these students behaved in accordance with the rule before the intervention despite the cost of waiting, this suggests that conformity, rather than herding, or habit explains their initial choice of the lateral passageway during the evacuation drill.
…The experimenter emphasized that the study was not a simulation, and that there were real monetary consequences to their decisions. In particular, the students were informed that (1) the offers involved a real payment in Euros, (2) their acceptance of an offer was binding, and (3) the only way they could avoid the possibility of accepting was to circling item C, or to decline to participate by leaving the question blank. In order to increase the credibility and salience of the potentially large payments, the experimenter held up, for the students to see, the 3,000 Euros in cash that was available, and then informed them that some of the envelopes contained offers in the hundreds of Euros. The amount in the envelope varied between 5 Euros and 150 Euros. We attempted to improve the credibility of the payment and the study in 2 ways: (1) we prominently displayed euro bills in the thousands that could be gained, (2) we emphasized the seriousness of the study and the fact that student responses were to be taken as commitments.
…Nearly half of students will accept any offer in the alone treatment, whereas a minority 11% of students will reject any offer…he economics students appear to be more inclined to accept any offer, with a 12.5% higher rate of accepting any offer…The law students appear to be more inclined to reject any offer with a 11.2% higher rate of rejecting any offer.
See Also:
-
“The explanatory structure of unexplainable events: Causal constraints on magical reasoning”
-
“Believers in pseudoscience present lower evidential criteria”
-
“Talking to the Dead in the Classroom: How a Supposedly Psychic Event Impacts Beliefs and Feelings”
-
“Conspiracy mentality and political orientation across 26 countries”