Very Bad Wizards is a podcast featuring a philosopher (Tamler Sommers) and a psychologist (David Pizarro), who share a love for ethics, pop culture, and cognitive science, and who have a marked inability to distinguish sacred from profane. Each podcast includes discussions of moral philosophy, recent work on moral psychology and neuroscience, and the overlap between the two.
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Episode 266: I Want to Half-Believe
Last December, with Argentina minutes away from a World Cup championship, friend of the show Yoel texted David “congratulations.” David was furious, and soon after (with less than 2 minutes left in extra time) France’s Mbappe scored a game-tying goal to send the match into penalty kicks. (Argentina ended up winning or Yoel might have become ‘former friend of the show.’) David says he doesn’t believe in jinxes at all but his actions suggest otherwise. We talk about a paper on this phenomenon of “half-belief”: when your behavior and your stated beliefs don’t align. Plus Tamler and David take a survey and discover that they lead radically different inner lives.
James Steele's Tweet
Caspi, A., Shmuel, E., & Chajut, E. (2023). A quantitative examination of half-belief in superstition. Journal of Individual Differences.
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