Way back in the 1890s, in an article I found in the archives of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, one observer predicted that the current influx of better educated players into the game and the “gradual weeding out of bummers and thugs” would raise the intellectual standard of the game and reduce baseball’s rampant superstitions. It didn’t. I first examined baseball magic in the late 1960s for a term paper; when I returned as an anthropologist decades later to study the culture of baseball, I expected to find less superstition. Unlike in my playing days, most of today’s players have spent a few years in college and therefore, I reasoned, with more education were less apt to be superstitious. It wasn’t true. They are less willing to admit to having “superstitions,” but when asked about their routines and what they do to give themselves luck, they often describe rituals, taboos, and fetishes little different from my teammates in the
I find it fascinating that regardless of an individual’s education level, that the need to try and midigate the fear of uncertainty and the uncontrollable remains present across peoples and time. It’s similar to the example given of pigeons replicating behaviour for food pellets as a result of classical conditioning. Humans are no different in that regard as they are participating in a non burdensome action in order to (even if irrationally rooted) guarantee a given outcome.