Today is Friday the 13th . For no logical understanding , people around the world consider it to be aprofoundly unlucky day . This is a superstition with no light pedigree , although it sure as shooting seems to be widespread .
But is there any scientific truth to this chronicle ? Ruling out any mystical effect at workplace , is Friday the 13th really as unlucky as people claim ? Could there be aself - fulfil prophecywhere the great unwashed have more uncollectible destiny because they expect to , or is it in fact the opposite , where mass behave peculiarly guardedly to avoid any misfortune ?
Numbers Game
First things first : Is there any statistical evidence to suggest that Friday the 13th is in reality a misfortune - prone day ?
There are some statistical studies that do cite the issue Friday the 13th will have on chance event charge per unit . A few have looked specifically at cable car accidents : a 2002Finnish studyshows that up to 38 % of traffic deaths involving women on this 24-hour interval may be attributable to the increase anxiety consociate with the " unlucky " date ; conversely , a 2008Dutch studyshows that there were less accidents overall on Friday the 13th . In 1993 , a British Medical Journal study investigating the phenomenon – or lack thereof – appears to match with the Finnish study , stating that there may be a 52 % increment in traffic accidents on that Clarence Day ; the source of the study actually recommend stick at home that sidereal day .
However , the sample sizes of these very circumscribed studies are incredibly small , and attributing chance event to a difficult to define psychological effect is unbelievably difficult to do accurately . “ It ’s really hard to line up any literal falsifiable data point of it,”Dean Burnett , a Dr. of neuroscience , reader and author , told IFLScience . “ People cover incidents every day of the twelvemonth . How do you ascribe an incident to be in bad luck rather than incompetence ?
“ The sampling will be affected by people endeavor to be specially more careful on a twenty-four hours they ' be intimate ' to be ill-starred . And besides , what counts as unlucky ? ” After all , fall back your house to a hurricane and incidentally dropping your phone into a toilet are both unlucky , but the former is inarguably far worse .
So without any reliable statistical evidence , how did the rumor ever start ?
Superstition , myth , and hype
The number 13 has historically been see as luckless , and superstitions of odd number go right smart back . Burnett also noted that our brains prefer even numbers as they are easier to do genial calculations with , whereas funny numbers require more thought .
Thirteen is also the first “ unfamiliar ” identification number we encounter , distinct from 12 hour on a clock expression , 12 months in a twelvemonth , and our times practice , which ends at 12 as minor . We are innately more comfortable with familiarity – this is a psychological phenomenon known as themere - exposure effect .
It may be a mix of religion and myth . There have been hint it is related to the Christian story of Jesus break down on a Friday following the Last Supper , which host 13 people , where he was betrayed . In the Norse caption , Loki is the 13th guest at a dinner jell for 12 god honoring Baldur , whose death he is responsible for for .
As for the supposedly doomed combining of Friday and the identification number 13 ? “ I ca n’t say for certain , there ’s no existent base in reality for why this is the display case , ” Burnett continued . “ Perhaps people are more careless on a Friday ; people are still work out , but they ’re less reinvigorated , less focussed . ” So accident may occur more oft on these days , and the association with the identification number 13 simply exasperate masses ’s perception of how stroke - prostrate they are at the clock time .
False Positives
There is at least one but no more than three Friday the 13ths every yr . That ’s roughly172 Friday the 13ths every 100 , so that ’s quite a slew of accumulated bad luck , which is bad news for those suffer fromparaskevidekatriaphobia – the debilitating fright of this day . As Burnettpoints out , however , this is indeed a phobia , anirrational fear , which suggest that mass love that their anxiety is factually unfounded and certainly misplace . But then irrational care are tight touch to superstitious beliefs , which essentially take seeing patterns that are n’t actually there . Humans , over their long evolutionary history , have developed a keen mother wit of pattern detection , but unfortunately sometimes this travel us up .
Say you ’re walking through a timber and learn a rustling nearby . Could this be a dangerous predator , or perhaps just the wind instrument ? Both are probable , but only one will be truthful at any one fourth dimension , so we tend to react based on which interpretation we instinctively pick out . We are , however , more potential to endure in the long terminal figure if every time we see rustle , we assume that it ’s a dangerous vulture . In most cases , we will leap out of the way , only to retrieve it ’s nothing more than the confidential information . In some cases , we ’ll be correct , and we ’ll survive an plan of attack .
So , naturally , we are evolutionarily hardwired to trust that there are threats – or merely just patterns – out there in the globe even if most of the clip there are n’t . It ’s a survival inherent aptitude , and we all receive these “ false positive ” from time to sentence . So perhaps Friday the 13th ’s repute comes from anecdotal faux positives across the mankind , build up up to the tip wherein it became “ coarse knowledge ” that the foreboding day was profoundly luckless .
In a way , Friday the 13th is an fantabulous example ofconfirmation prejudice . If something luckless happens to you on this day , then – compounded by the anecdotal evidence that the day is indeed ill-omened – you will go out of your fashion to be measured on those date , while still assume that the forces of chance are somehow out to get you .
