The Law of Contagion
From New Scientist: Anthropologists and psychologists have long been interested in superstitions. One of the key categories of superstitious thinking is the "law of contagion", which says that when an object has been in contact with someone, it somehow acquires their "essence". Psychologist Paul Rozin and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have investigated how common such thinking is today.
They asked people to rate how they would feel about wearing a nice, soft, blue jumper that had been freshly laundered - but previously worn by someone else. As they varied the fictitious previous wearers of the jumper, it became clear how strongly people follow the age-old belief in magical contagion.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the volunteers were unhappiest about wearing the jumper if they were told it had previously belonged to a serial killer. On the whole they would rather have worn a sweater that had been dropped in dog faeces and not washed - raising genuine health concerns - than a laundered sweater that had been worn by a mass murderer.
Even in the 21st century, we are far from being the rational creatures that we like to think we are, as a final part of the experiment made dismayingly clear. When asked to imagine that the laundered sweater had been worn by someone who had contracted HIV through a blood transfusion, most people once again said they wouldn't wear it.
If we momentarily took over each others livejournals we wouldn't discover the essence of being 'other'. We'd just encounter ourselves without the same fictious mental jewellery with which we regularly adorn ourselves. (In a highly conceputal moment this is where Freaky Friday went awry!)
~Niveau
They asked people to rate how they would feel about wearing a nice, soft, blue jumper that had been freshly laundered - but previously worn by someone else. As they varied the fictitious previous wearers of the jumper, it became clear how strongly people follow the age-old belief in magical contagion.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the volunteers were unhappiest about wearing the jumper if they were told it had previously belonged to a serial killer. On the whole they would rather have worn a sweater that had been dropped in dog faeces and not washed - raising genuine health concerns - than a laundered sweater that had been worn by a mass murderer.
Even in the 21st century, we are far from being the rational creatures that we like to think we are, as a final part of the experiment made dismayingly clear. When asked to imagine that the laundered sweater had been worn by someone who had contracted HIV through a blood transfusion, most people once again said they wouldn't wear it.
If we momentarily took over each others livejournals we wouldn't discover the essence of being 'other'. We'd just encounter ourselves without the same fictious mental jewellery with which we regularly adorn ourselves. (In a highly conceputal moment this is where Freaky Friday went awry!)
~Niveau