Why children believe crazy stuff

Have you seen some kids avoiding the cracks on the pavement or the lines between tiles on the floor? Do you think they do it because they truly believe that if they touch the cracks, they’ll lose their health? Well, kids do these things because they are biologically programmed for superstition. According to psychologists, children are highly imaginative, and this can lead them to form belief in relationships between things that don’t make sense. They reach certain conclusions about these relationships after a few trials. We’re born with an innate tendency to find relationships between things, and this drive sometimes goes overboard, which leads us to perceive relationships between things when they don’t exist in reality.

This tendency towards superstition helps beliefs such as belief in the supernatural thrive. It is also the driving factor in our scientific discoveries. However, there are superstitions that we can’t simply explain with psychology. There is a complicated combination of cultural traditions, language and social factors that lead children to superstitious beliefs. No one directly teaches kids to become superstitious. Instead, as they grow up, they hear about things like luck or supernatural creatures and usually have an understanding of how they work. It is also possible that children get a lot of their belief in superstition from children’s books.