I think these reflected a kind of magical thinking when infant mortality was significantly more common -- what happened before the child died must have been the cause.
It's probably more of a list of things people are scared of and things people wish for. Relating to your comment, I'm not sure your thinking conveys what you mean - most causes of death relate to what happened before you died.
gfaure probably meant something we now would consider completely unrelated. An owl hooted twice, and then the child died. So two hoots from a certain type of owl predicts a death in the house. As silly as this sounds to us today, there's a huge survival value in making these kinds of connections. Certain smells and tastes predict toxic subtances, certain noises predict predators or natural disasters, and certain animal behaviours predict all kinds of calamities.
When I was a child in the 80's in Brazil this was still widespread. I remember walking over a relatively short friend of mine (we were both around 8 years old) and his grandmother physically made me step back over him to undo it, so it wouldn't prevent him from growing.
It is superstitions like this that leads me to think somebody must have made up a reason to little kids how they should not cross over a child as a matter of manners, but wrapped it in a story that led into adulthood.
Good link.
Are there any studies on modern days supersititions, and how they differ by country? In Japan there are tons of supersititions still very much alive for about everything in life.
I have a superstition that when people in a startup start fabulating about the company jet it's time to jump ship. Based on a sample-of-one experience, but I've happily extrapolated to the population (statistical word meaning). Since I'm with another startup I hastily and aggressively stop anyone talking about possible riches as soon as they try to voice such thoughts, to prevent the curse from spreading.
I know I can make plenty of money with established enterprises - have done that as employee and as freelancer, getting lots of money. So I'm at the position I'm in, while giving up a lot of sure and easy money, because I hate 9-5 jobs and doing highly paid but uninteresting projects (and not infrequently I got paid for nothing but being present, even when they had to pay an hourly rate). I don't want coworkers with dollar signs in their eyes.
I had a tech startup superstition of my own: When a founder asks you to write answers on a FAQ page or knowledge base in response to questions that have never actually been asked by a customer yet, the startup will fail.
Based on a similar philosophy about detached thinking at the top, and how it sinks companies. Answers to customer questions should only be posted after they've been asked at least once, otherwise it's a sign the founders are daydreaming about customers with problems that don't exist yet
Especially in the telecom world, yet applicable elsewhere, a fancy new company HQ building means its all over in less than two years, closed, bankrupt, sold, etc. In two years it'll be an empty building. Ditto for extremely fancy new data center.
You're going to get a lot of low energy responses about politics and religion, best to exclude those areas upfront.
Outside those hopefully forbidden areas, talk to non-tech kids (most of them) about tech. Kids as in little kids not 22 yr old grads. My own kids have crazy ideas based on anecdotal sample sizes of one and childish reasoning (which is appropriate, them being children), about only white ipad charging cables work, very strange almost witchcraft beliefs about working around how the school district has locked down the ipads which often gets in the way of real work and fooling around, etc. Based on observation, giving non-tech kids lots of tech that required logical thinking to create has not via osmosis resulted in logical thinking appearing inside the kids heads, but has resulted in lots of nonsense superstitions about technology. I'm sure a hundred years ago my kids would sound like something out of the article WRT cooking fire lore and hairpin divination, but today their lives are full of ipad and internet, so their nonsense sounds very tech-flavored.
Actually just talking to non-tech people about software patches, banner ads, malware infected windows machines, all that stuff is pretty entertaining WRT superstition. There is truth in "windows is voodoo" for a large segment of the population.
Though to be fair, these are more examples of pseudoscience than folk wisdom. Their acceptance is generally based on the same magical thinking however.
Now I want to see a list of superstitions that have not been lost, but are nonetheless still silly. Step on a crack, break your mother's back. Throw salt over your shoulder for good luck. Find a penny, pick it up, etc.
