Superstition and MMOs

The Daedelus Project, a site dedicated to researching the psychology of MMOs, posts some thoughts on superstitious behaviour in MMOs:

From beta all the way through months into launch players were CONVINCED that if you used the diplomacy skill on a chest it would improve the loot you got. This was SO widespread that you literally could not get in a pick up group without them querying about the diplomacy skills of the party and someone forcing everyone to wait while the highest diplomacy skill player cringed before the chest sufficiently. No matter how many times we posted on the forums that this was a myth and it doesn't do anything, they kept doing it. It got so bad our community relations manager even put it in his sig. Finally we made chests an invalid target for the diplomacy skill, then players whined that all the points they put into diplomacy were worthless because we "nerfed" the skill!

This is related to one of B.F. Skinner's behavioural conditioning studies in which he made pigeons behave in a superstitious manner:

B.F. Skinner is well-known for his theory of behavioral conditioning, but one of his quirkiest studies involved inducing superstition in pigeons (1948). 8 pigeons were placed in a reinforcement contraption (i.e., Skinner Box) and were given a food pellet every 15 seconds no matter what they did. After several days, each pigeon had fixated on a particular superstitious behavior. One pigeon danced counter-clockwise, another two developed a left-to-right head-swinging motion, another attacked an invisible object in the top right corner of the cage, and so forth. This phenomenon has also been replicated among high-school students (Bruner & Revuski, 1961). And given that MMOs are a kind of Skinner Box that offer some random rewards (e.g., rare drops), it's not surprising that superstitious behaviors emerge in MMOs as well.

I myself have experienced these first hand through many games, most recently in WoW and LOTRO. Some even become inside jokes among the sceptics like me (e.g. when someone brings up the belief that the loot table in an instance is determined by who makes and leads the group, we exclaim "Oh, and I hear Onyxia deep breaths more often too!" - a reference to the widely disproved theories that every patch caused the Onyxia encounter to change behaviours for the worse.)

This doesn't mean I'm immune to my own superstitions. For example, I deeply hold the belief that if we're doing well on a new boss encounter, and it looks like we're going to win, it is extremely important NOT to say "We've got this" or any variation thereof. Saying anything even remotely close to that will surely lead to a failed attempt. Granted, there are also psychological reasons for this (someone claiming victory before it is 100% assured can lead part of the group to relax, therefore paying less attention and dropping overall group performance), but in the end, it's just another superstition we all seem to fall victim to. Via kotaku.