考前“锦鲤”你赞了吗？“迷信成功人士”有用么？

Almost every week there’s a new article outlining a high-flying individual’s behaviours – with the implied promise that using the same techniques could deliver us fame and fortune, too.

网上几乎每周都会发布一篇新的文章，分享成功者的经验，仿佛在暗示我们效仿此法就能名利双收。

Thanks to media, when a billionaire, acclaimed author or world-class athlete tells us about their daily routine,  we may then follow their advice as if it were the gospel truth.

由于媒体的传播，当亿万富翁、著名作家或世界级运动员向我们讲述日常生活时，他们的经验可能会被我们奉为圭臬。

Some of their advice is relatively common sense: you’ ll often hear how top CEOs like Elon Musk begin work early, skip breakfast and divide their time into small, manageable tasks. Bill Gates would reportedly rock backwards and forwards in his chair while brainstorming – a bodily means of focusing the mind that apparently spread across the Microsoft boardroom. Gates was also very particular in his choice of notebook: it had to be a yellow legal pad.

Why do successful people follow such eccentrically specific habits? And why are we so keen to read about them and mimic them in our own lives?

The answer lies in a powerful psychological process called "superstitious learning". The brain is constantly looking for associations between two events. While it is mostly correct, it sometimes mistakes coincidence for causality – leading us to attribute success to something as arbitrary as the colour of our notebook or the number of beans in our brew, rather than our own talent or hard work. Most of the time, correlation does not mean causation, although it may feel like it does.

And when we hear of other’s triumphs, we often end up copying their habits, too, including the knowledge that they had acquired through superstitious learning. A key reason for this is that humans are social creatures; we are primed to look to people of higher status for advice. Various studies over the past decade have shown that we have a tendency to “over-imitate” when we learn from others, even if there is no obvious logical reason for a particular deed.

Another factor is that as a social species, so much of what we know about the world comes from common wisdom. It would therefore seem safe to assume that if other people believe in the utility of a particular action, there might be something to it. If people around you say you should not eat those mushrooms, it’s probably a good idea to avoid them.

This “better safe than sorry” attitude is one of the main reasons superstitions are so widespread.

Although the initial association with success may have been illusory, the positive mindset that it produces really does improve our performance, so we do it again and again. Other studies have found that asking participants to perform small rituals can improve everything from academic performance to pitch accuracy in karaoke singing. In some ways, it’s a bit like the placebo effect in medicine – the sense that you are doing something positive can itself change the outcome.

Research shows that rituals and superstitions spike during times of uncertainty, and performing them can help reduce anxiety and boost performance. When people feel powerless, turning to familiar actions provides a sense of control, which, even if illusory, can still be comforting.

Given these findings, we need not be embarrassed by the little rituals that pepper our days; if the action costs nothing and helps you to feel a bit more in control of your day, it’s perfectly rational to continue. Whether you’ve been inspired by past experience or are mimicking your heroes, your arbitrary rituals may just push you a little a bit closer to the success you seek.

In some cases, when spuriousassociations influence high-level decision-making, superstitious learning may be costly. One 2020 study of Swedish biotech companies found that two CEOs who had come to associate certain marketing strategies with success religiously repeated the same steps in their new start-ups – even though there was no logical reason to think that the specific approach could work again.

不过，有时候迷信式学习导致的漏洞百出的关联性意识，会让我们在高层决策时付出沉重的代价。2020年对瑞典生物科技公司的一项研究发现，两位首席执行官每次都在新公司重复之前的经营步骤，因为他们盲目地相信以前的营销策略一定会带来成功，但没有任何逻辑能够证明这一点。

Rovira Nordman, who was a co-author of the study，suggests that whenever we are making an important decision, we apply our critical thinking to question all the assumptions that we are making and the evidence for them.