Purchasing insurance is another way people attempt to deter fate and reduce the likelihood of an accident. Orit Tykocinski of the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel asked people to imagine going on a trip to Bangkok with or without insurance.
The insured group rated the probability of illness or lost luggage lower than the other group did. Risen and Gilovich note that going against any superstition, no matter how silly, can feel like tempting fate because of the anticipated regret of misfortune after flouting conventional wisdom. Regret is real. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue.
See Subscription Options. Discover World-Changing Science. Do people really believe such actions can change their fortunes? Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Support science journalism. You have mostly dirty laundry and are looking for a clean shirt to wear. While looking through your drawers, you find a Stanford shirt that you had bought when visiting the school months before.
After considering that you do not know whether or not you have gotten into the school yet and that a lot of people will see you wearing the shirt at the party 2.
The preceding phrase is omitted in the no party condition , you decide to wear the shirt. The results are shown in Figure 2. These results replicate those from Experiments 1 and 2. When the make-a-difference cue was present the party in Experiment 3 and legally binding contract in Experiments 1 and 2 participants judged that the action increased the likelihood of the bad outcome only when the outcome was not yet decided. Signing a contract and wearing a sweatshirt are quite dissimilar actions, but when the make-a-difference cue is present they both have the potential to exacerbate the loss due to the uncontrolled outcome.
The robustness across different scenarios speaks against the possibility that the effect is driven by something idiosyncratic about either vignette. Taken together the experiments provide support for our hypothesis that an illusion of control that depends on a causal frame modulates the reluctance to tempt fate.
We also replicated the main effect of tempting fate when no make-a-difference cues were present the no party condition. Again, this effect is not predicted by our account and is addressed below. In Experiment 4 we explored the making-a-difference requirement of causality. We hypothesized that the tempting fate effect would be attenuated in cases that involve two bad options.
In such cases, the action may still interact to change one of the outcomes, but will not influence overall well-being since the outcome will be bad either way.
Participants were asked to imagine that they are college students and that they have a long reading assignment for a large lecture class due the next day. The uncontrolled outcome is whether they are called on in class.
In the win-lose condition participants were asked to imagine that friends invite them to go out drinking instead of doing the reading. We hypothesized that doing so would tempt fate because doing the reading makes a difference to potential embarrassment in class; getting called on is worse in the case that the reading was not done. In the lose-lose condition participants read that they have a ten-page term paper due the following day but they have not started it.
The decision was whether to spend more time writing the paper and ignore the reading assignment. In this case, the protagonist has no good option.
Despite the fact that doing the reading makes a difference to one outcome i. We predicted that this would diminish the illusion of control and that the tempting fate effect would therefore be attenuated. The design and procedure were similar to the previous experiments except that the make-a-difference cue was always present in the sense that the decision to do the reading interacts with whether one is called on to determine potential embarrassment.
Instead we manipulated whether the decision was a win-lose or a lose-lose. The vignettes for both conditions are shown below. The text outside the parentheses represents the condition where the decision is made before the outcome is determined and the protagonist takes the action. Italicized sentences are those we manipulated participants did not see italics and the text inside the parentheses is numbered to denote the independent variable: 1 for temporal order and 2 for whether the action is taken.
After reading the vignette participants were asked to judge the likelihood the professor would call on them on a point scale. You are a college student and one night you have a long reading assignment for a large lecture class due the next day due.
Your friends ask you if you want to go out drinking with them. Although you are unaware of it, the professor has a particular seat in the classroom in mind and he will ask a question in class the next day about the reading to the person who happens to be sitting in that seat if no one first volunteers to answer. You decide not to do the assigned reading for class and instead go out drinking with your friends.
You decide to turn them down and instead spend that time doing the assigned reading for class. The next day in the large lecture class, the professor asks the class a question about the assigned reading, but nobody answers.
In fact, the class sits in silence for a full two minutes. Then, the professor announces that if nobody can provide an answer he will choose someone randomly. You are a college student and one night you have a ten-page term paper due the following day but you have not started it. You also have a long reading assignment for a large lecture class due the next day. You decide not to do the assigned reading for class and use the time to work on your paper instead. You decide to do the assigned reading for class anyway even though it takes up time that you could use to work on your paper instead.
The results are shown in Figure 3. The three-way interaction was not significant. To interpret these results we further analyzed the data with separate ANOVAs for win-lose and lose-lose conditions.
To summarize, going out drinking with friends instead of doing the reading was seen as tempting fate, but only when the uncontrolled outcome was not pre-determined. This corroborates the results of Experiments 1—3. Apparently the lack of any good option reduced the sense that not doing the reading tempted fate. This is consistent with the idea that the illusion of control requires a decision that makes a difference to overall well-being.
In the absence of a good option, the decision-maker does not really have control over his or her fate. This may be because all conditions had a make-a-difference cue. In 4 experiments we tested the hypothesis that the effect is the result of an illusion of control. We did so by varying whether or not the outcome had already occurred but was unknown before the tempting action was performed.
In all 4 experiments, the hypothesis was confirmed: The tempting fate effect was strongest when the action was prior to the outcome. This suggests that tempting fate is at least in part a type of magical causal thinking, belief in the ability to influence events in the absence of a mechanism to do so e.
Presumably participants would agree and would deny their action would actually influence the fateful outcome. Experiments 1—3 also tested the hypothesis that the illusion of control requires make-a-difference cues, cues that suggest the agent has control over some outcome even if not the fateful outcome of primary interest.
This hypothesis was also confirmed. Make-a-difference cues are likely governed by the same principles that determine other causal attributions for a review, see Sloman, Experiment 4 tested the hypothesis that make-a-difference cues will have no effect when all outcomes are negative the lose-lose conditions because making a difference to the value of the outcome is a prerequisite for a relation to be causal.
This hypothesis was also supported. Experiments 1 and 3 did produce an unexpected result, a small tempting fate effect in the absence of make-a-difference cues.
It may be that there are two independent routes to a feeling that an action tempts fate: One arises when there are make-a-difference cues and it respects temporal priority while the other only arises when there are no such cues. The illusion of control appears to be the more powerful contributor however in that the tempting fate effect was always larger in the presence than absence of make-a-difference cues.
In fact, we observed no tempting fate effect at all in the lose-lose case of Experiment 4 suggesting the fragility of the effect in the absence of a sense of control. In conclusion, tempting fate is strongly influenced by an aura of causality. The mere presence of cues suggesting that the agent has control over an event that is not the target event is sufficient to increase the judged probability that the target event will turn out poorly assuming it is not a lose-lose situation. In this sense, checking the weather report does not tempt fate because such an action does not directly influence well-being.
Unfortunately, the sense of control gets applied to the wrong outcome whether it will rain as opposed to whether you will get wet. This all holds even though the agent knows that his or her action cannot possibly influence the outcome. In that sense, tempting fate involves a chain of faulty causal inference, from make-a-difference cues that are directed at the wrong outcome to a sense of influence over an event that one knows one cannot influence.
Misguided causal thinking about our actions may arise because one of the ways in which people maintain personal control is to provide reasons for experiences e. Indeed, the more an individual is invested in a situation, the more he or she will search for variables that he or she can control e. The feeling of tempting fate may therefore be the product of a valuable human coping mechanism. Alloy, L. Assessment of covariation by humans and animals: The joint influence of prior expectations and current situational information.
Psychological Review , 91 , — Bleak, J. Superstitious behavior in sport: Levels of effectiveness and determinants of use in three collegiate sports. Journal of Sport Behavior, 21, 1— She was a grown young woman when she was overtaken by what she supposed to be the climax of her fate. Noble ambition—worthy of a less ignoble cause—a better fate! New Word List Word List. Save This Word! See synonyms for tempt fate on Thesaurus. We could talk until we're blue in the face about this quiz on words for the color "blue," but we think you should take the quiz and find out if you're a whiz at these colorful terms.
Words related to tempt fate ask for it , bell the cat , push one's luck , try one's hand.
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