Complementary medicines, traditional remedies and home cures for medical ailments are used extensively world-wide, representing more than US$60 billion sales in the global market. With serious doubts about the efficacy and safety of many treatments, the industry remains steeped in controversy. Little is known about factors affecting the prevalence of efficacious and non-efficacious self-medicat...

Illusions of causality occur when people develop the belief that there is a causal connection between two events that are actually unrelated. Such illusions have been proposed to underlie pseudoscience and superstitious thinking, sometimes leading to disastrous consequences in relation to critical life areas, such as health, finances, and wellbeing. Like optical illusions, they can occur for an...

Szechwan is one of the largest, richest and most populous provinces in China, extending from 101?-111? east longitude and 27?-24? north latitude. The population is estimated at 45,000,000. It is essentially an agricultural province; the important crops are rice, sweet potatoes and corn. Though the land is very fertile and productive, the living standard in rural Szechwan is very low. The food o...

Many superstitious practices entail the belief that good or bad luck can be "washed away." Consistent with this belief, participants who recalled (Experiment 1) or experienced (Experiment 2) an episode of bad luck were more willing to take risk after having as opposed to not having washed their hands, whereas participants who recalled or experienced an episode of good luck were less willing to ...

Irrational or illogical beliefs are referred to variously as magical thinking, peculiar beliefs, superstitious beliefs, and half-beliefs. We first distinguish the various terms according to their most common and relevant usage for consumer psychologists and define a conceptual structure for the roles of conscious and nonconscious processes associated with peculiar beliefs in decision-making. We...

and relief in time of sickness?of their castes, their tenets, and their practices, and any one so disposed might glean from the Indian medical periodicals of the last half century materials for a very instructive essay on the subject. We hear, on the one hand, of a physician caste, learned in the traditions of a past era, holding as an heir-loom an empirical knowledge of remedies, which we shou...

The topic of the relationship between obsessive and delusional thinking can be developed from a descriptive point of view, focusing the differential aspects, and from a standpoint more sensible towards the continuity linking the two phenomena, looking for those elements contributing to c1arify the dynamic relationship between them. As Binswanger [1957] wrote: «In the “linnean” system of psychop...

Three studies examined the potential interactions of the experiential system and positive affect (PA) in predicting superstitious beliefs and sympathetic magic. In Study 1, experientiality and induced positive mood interacted to predict the emergence of belief in videos purporting to show unidentified flying objects or ghosts. In Study 2, naturally occurring PA interacted with experientiality t...

The present study utilized a repeated cross-sectional survey design to examine belief in conspiracy theories about the abduction of Natascha Kampusch. At two time points (October 2009 and October 2011), participants drawn from independent cross-sections of the Austrian population (Time Point 1, N = 281; Time Point 2, N = 277) completed a novel measure of belief in conspiracy theories concerning...

Human factors are implicated in most security (and safety) problems, a ubiquitous aspect being erosion of compliance. We discuss several theories of the role of human factors and present system dynamic models based on the theoretical paradigm of instrumental conditioning (the behavioral regulation theory). The proposed mechanism involves learning – both adequate and inadequate, ‘superstitious’ ...