Human beings: Hardwired for superstition

[Lagmonster]

One disconnect in this argument seems to be that Kanastrous raised the issue of disclosure as a LEGAL requirement, whereas Simon et al seem to be focused on the ethical requirements.

I would argue that it is ethically right to disclose information; religious buyers want their religious preferences catered to, and we should not try to fool them into making a purchase they would be uncomfortable with even if their motives are ass. I once knew a Chinese businessman who refused to have his business phone number have certain 'unlucky' digits in it, apparently a commonplace issue with that culture.

That said, I understand Kanastrous' lambasting of the strict legal 10 year death notice requirement - that's enshrining a very specific and highly limited aspect of public irrationality into law, which may be taking it too far in the first place and, as he points out, hardly encompasses the full range of possible aesthetic or irrational objections.

[Kanastrous]

That said, I understand Kanastrous' lambasting of the strict legal 10 year death notice requirement - that's enshrining a very specific and highly limited aspect of public irrationality into law, which may be taking it too far in the first place and, as he points out, hardly encompasses the full range of possible aesthetic or irrational objections.

Yes.

Look, if some buyer has some personal freakiness about whatever-the-hell makes 'em freaky, they are welcome to ask about it and I do consider myself bound to answer truthfully, or at the very least to the best of my knowledge. But I do not recognize a right on their part to expect that I am going to proactively catalog and present whatever silly irrational bullshit might put off every last imaginable buyer for reasons that have nothing at all to do with the real qualities of the property in question.

You're afraid of ghosts? Fine, you're a fucking idiot but if you want to ask if anyone died in the house within the last ten years I'll tell you. Don't expect me to volunteer the information, though, as if it actually means anything in the real world, because it doesn't and I feel no obligation to jump onto your field and adopt your view of the world wherein properties are haunted and the spirits of the dead walk among us, and a death in a house means anything outside a note on the coroner's report.

[Simon_Jester]

When the information in question is a matter of public record (address of death), and can easily be obtained by a search of local records, and when the purchase is on the order of a hundred thousand dollars, making the effort required for the search trivial by comparison...

I think that if a majority of the population (whether they believe in ghosts or just don't like thinking about someone dying in their bedroom) would prefer to know, it is not unreasonable to expect realtors to have that information on hand, whether the realtor thinks it matters or not.

If I ask the realtor whether there are stains on the carpet in places I can't see because the furniture is sitting on it at the moment, I don't want to hear "Fine, you're a fucking idiot but if you want to ask about some petty irrelevant discoloration that happened five years ago I'll tell you. Don't expect me to volunteer the information, though, as if it actually means anything in the real world, because it doesn't and I feel no obligation to jump onto your field and adopt your view of the world wherein a white carpet with a red spot is somehow worse than a white carpet without one."

If I do, I'm going to be tempted to say "take your house with its probably-stained-all-to-hell carpet and shove it up your ass, I'm going to do business with someone who doesn't tell me what I ought to want to buy."

[Kanastrous]

A stain on a carpet is relevant to the condition of the house because it's a physical feature of the house. A physical stain on a solid object existing in the real world. Do you actually equate real objects in the real world with spooks and spirits and ghosties?

And do you *really* think that I - or most anyone else - is going to *tell* the fucking idiot that they are being a fucking idiot? I have enough background in sales to distinguish between what's to be said and what's to be merely thought to one's self. Scratch that, I have enough fucking common sense. Maybe you don't, since you can't imagine crediting it to someone else.

[Patrick Degan]

In baseball, you've got plenty of superstitious thinking and behaviour: players who are on particular streaks, be it pitching or hitting, who wear the same cap or pair of socks or whatever, or carry the charm they happened to have when they got that first home-run/triple/safe hit of the season. At some forgotten corner of the mind, they'll think that as long as they've still got that charm each time they ascend the mound or step into the batter's box, success will continue to follow them. It's still a rule of thumb that you don't talk about a pitcher throwing a perfect game in fear that doing so will blow it. At the opposite end of the spectrum, you've got the Cubs and their fans' obsession with failure and disaster due to the Curse of the Goat: it was invoked when the Cubs fell apart in the NL Championship series following the Steve Bartman incident and again when they just laid down like pussies in the Divisional series a couple years back. The Curse of the Bambino was invoked for decades in Boston as excuse for continual Red Sox failure: especially following the famous 1986 World Series incident when Bill Buckner let the ball roll through his legs. That stopped only in 2004 when the Red Sox finally won their first Series victory since 1918. They've since won a second World Series and have been consistent contenders for at least the wild card so continued success has blunted the Curse of the Bambino at long last. But you've got a legacy of Boston teams and their fans who talked themselves into decades of failure on that one superstition.

[Formless]

Why should we jump to the conclusion of biological programming to explain something that is just as adequately explained as a byproduct of our ability to spot false patterns in nature and dissemination of cultural information? I mean, look at all those baseball examples Deegan put up. Someone sees a coincidence (I had this on me twice when I hit a home run!) doesn't stop and think that maybe its just a coincidence (the human brain just doesn't deal with statistics that well, its more suited to thinking about frequencies) and forms an association that does not exist. Plus whole societies can be selected for, thus bypassing the biological world entirely. This can explain why no two societies have the same superstitions. Remember, just because something evolved doesn't mean the substrate it evolved in was biological in nature. The death issue is harder to explain, but that too may be a simple product of our social instincts that most of the time serve the useful function of not offending other people in society.

I'm just not seeing enough evidence for it.

[Kanastrous]

No two societies have the exact same superstitions but one can still find a lot of common elements and parallels...does that perhaps suggest that the universal gift for pattern-recognition (or pattern-perception, anyway) may be mediated by a set of complementary physiological processes?

[Simon_Jester]

A stain on a carpet is relevant to the condition of the house because it's a physical feature of the house. A physical stain on a solid object existing in the real world.

Sure, it's a physical feature, but why is it relevant? Functionally, the stained carpet isn't different. It's still functional, and unless there are active bugs or molds growing on it it's not a health hazard.

The difference between a stained carpet and an unstained one is purely aesthetic. We dislike stained carpets because they are unattractive to us. How is that a more objective basis for a purchasing decision than "My fear of death is sufficient that I don't want to think about how someone else died in this house?"

If you're going to condemn people for making irrational decisions, even in your own mind, and try to withhold the information that would allow them to make irrational decisions... why does that apply to "someone died in this house" and not to "there's a stain on the carpet?"

Do you actually equate real objects in the real world with spooks and spirits and ghosties?

No, but I equate people's purely arbitrary opinions about objects in the real world (like their favorite color or their dislike of red spots on a white carpet) to people's purely arbitrary opinions about issues like death.

In both cases, I could get up on my Straw Vulcan high horse and say "objectively, it is illogical to prefer X over Y, since all colors are just different frequencies of electromagnetic radiation and since there is no physical means by which a death occuring in a house can alter your life." But I don't have a right to impose Straw Vulcan ideas of how the universe should work on other people.

And do you *really* think that I - or most anyone else - is going to *tell* the fucking idiot that they are being a fucking idiot? I have enough background in sales to distinguish between what's to be said and what's to be merely thought to one's self. Scratch that, I have enough fucking common sense. Maybe you don't, since you can't imagine crediting it to someone else.

What makes you think the customer won't be able to tell? Or will find out that you kept a secret because you despise their judgement, and downrate you to their friends? You don't have to openly scorn a customer's opinions in order to create a situation where you deservedly lose business.

[Formless]

@ Kanastrous: Perhaps, and that's really what most evolutionary processes lead to. However, that is not exactly the same IMO as saying that humans are hardwired for superstition. It just means that our minds naturally have deficits in the reasoning department that require special education to fix. But you can't call every cognitive bias and intuition error a superstition. That would make it an over-broad category.

[Swindle1984]

I've seen this in action; I bought a weapons case for a new rifle for next to nothing because the gunstore could not get it sold. The reason? It was pre-owned, but not used, and the owner had died. Nothing 'evil', just an old man dying, and people did not want the case. I don't seem to be a victim of this particular irrationality, and have always found it curious in others, but I suspect I have different irrational vices.

'Mild' ocd qualifies as irrational behavior, perhaps...

A friend of mine got a pistol for free because nobody would buy it; the previous owner had committed suicide with the pistol.

I had another person get creeped out when I mentioned that I wondered if my M91-30, built in 1943, had been used to kill any Nazis. Considering the pristine condition it's in, I doubt it ever saw combat, but you never know. But just the mere idea that that rifle could have been used to kill someone had him creeped out.