Superstitions

INSTITUTO POLITECNICO NACIONAL
UNIDAD PROFESIONAL INTERDISCIPLINARIA DE INGENIERIA Y CIENCIAS SOCIALES Y ADMINISTRATIVAS


CENTRO DE LENGUAS EXTRANJERAS

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PROJECT:
“SUPERSTITIONS”



TEAM 2


Superstition is a belief in supernatural causality: that one event leads to the cause of another without any process in the physical worldlinking the two events. In all cultures there are beliefs in objects or rituals that attract good luck or make us safe from the evils which we suffer. Many of these traditions or rituals we perform "what if" are very old and come from civilizations that have disappeared.
The psychologist have studied the superstition, and they say, if we want to understand this topic, we need to talk abautMagical thinking, but, what is that? The Magical thinking is a way of thinking based on faith, imagination, desires, emotions and traditions that generates opinions lacking strong or strict logical foundation. A belief that one's thoughts, words or actions will cause or prevent a specific event in a way that defies the laws of cause and effect commonly acepted. However, other psychologist called“cognitive bias”, cognitive biases, is a cognitive distortion in the way humans perceive reality. Some of these processes have been verified empirically in the field of psychology, others are being considered as general categories of bias.
Superstition can affect all types of people, and issues such as gender or educational level do not appear to significantly influence the presence of such ideas. Whileit is true that the most primitive cultures involving over this type of behavior.Sometimes we think and infer things the wrong way, which in many cases it is beneficial to our lives. Some of these biases or irrational ways of thinking are: the tendency to stay with the data confirm our ideas, to reaffirm our view, the allocation of external causes mistakes and successes to internal, to safeguardour self-esteem, believing that imagine if something happens is as well (self-fulfilling prophecy) and inadvertently took a biased attitude towards the fulfillment of our prediction, which reinforces the sense of control over things.
And is that human beings always need an explanation of things, to have a sense of control, security. And with no explanation or bad, we prefer the latter. Forexample, before something negative has happened to us, such as having a serious failure on the job, if you do not find an explanation that satisfies us (and we do a logical analysis of the situation) we find the cause in some circumstances random or casual has been given at the same time, such as carrying something yellow (illusory correlation bias).
In short, like other superstitious behavior islearned through a partnership, in this case accidental or casual between two events. But sometimes you do not need direct experience to learn something, just that we see or hear from others (for example, we have all learned not to touch a power plug with wet hands, but not necessarily have to be subjected to shock).
There are some of the most popular superstitions:

Spilling salt

It isconsidered bad luck to spill salt, but the superstition most associated with this activity is not the act of spilling, but what comes next. In order to prevent the bad luck from settling on the salt spiller, the person who did the pilling is required to toss some of the spilled salt over his left shoulder. This very specific action is supposed to act as a shield, but must be done immediately for itsbenefits to take hold. This very interesting superstition has been around for a very long time, although its exact origins are obscured in history.

The origins of the spilling salt superstitions may lie in the fact that spilling salt was considered bad form long before it was considered bad luck. In ancient time salt was an expensive commodity, and one that had many useful purposes. Wasting...