What Do Broken-Hearted Knitters, Urinating Goalkeepers, and the C.I.A. Have in Common | Episode 490

Curses and other superstitions may have no basis in reality, but that doesn’t stop us from believing. Tenth-century French clerics used curses and maledictions to keep strongmen in line, while present-day courts encourage honesty by requiring us to swear on the Bible. Studies show that about half of us admit to being a little superstitious. From the Detroit Lions’ Bobby Layne curse to the Curse of the Bambino, many of us are quick to ascribe external causes to sports phenomena, and athletes themselves are a superstitious bunch — take Wade Boggs’ pre-game chicken meal or Serena Williams’ winning socks streaks. Speaking of socks, even knitters have their superstitions, with widespread belief in the “sweater curse.” So what is it about superstitions and curses that make them so irresistible? And will we ever be able to give them up? This episode was originally published January 12, 2022. For a full transcript, resources, and more, visit: https://freak.ws/3yIDtPw FOLLOW FREAKONOMICS RADIO: YouTube: https://freak.ws/3yIl6dl Apple Podcasts: https://freak.ws/3yAvQh0 Spotify: https://freak.ws/3TsdCmV ABOUT FREAKONOMICS RADIO: Discover the hidden side of everything with host Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers to uncover things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) — from the economics of sleep to the future of education, from markets for marriage to the surprising utility of wolves. ABOUT THE FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK: Freakonomics began as a book, which led to a blog, a documentary film, more books, a pair of pants, and in 2010, a podcast called Freakonomics Radio. Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner, it’s one of the most popular podcasts in the world, with a reputation for storytelling that is both rigorous and entertaining. Its archive of more than 500 episodes is available, for free, on any podcast app, and the show airs weekly on NPR stations. Freakonomics Radio is now the flagship show of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which includes the podcasts No Stupid Questions, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK PODCASTS: Freakonomics Radio: https://freakonomics.com/series/freakonomics-radio/ No Stupid Questions: https://freakonomics.com/series/nsq/ People I (Mostly) Admire: https://freakonomics.com/series/people-i-mostly-admire/ The Economics of Everyday Things: https://freakonomics.com/series/everyday-things/ Special series: https://freakonomics.com/topics/ CONNECT WITH US: [email protected] https://twitter.com/freakonomics https://www.instagram.com/freakonomics/ https://www.facebook.com/freakonomics/ https://www.tiktok.com/@freakonomicsradio https://www.linkedin.com/company/freakonomics-media Subscribe to our newsletter: http://eepurl.com/bKm0cf

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  I can't think of a single superstition I believe in. I don't knock on wood for good luck. Black cats do not scare me. I think they're beautiful. And I think it's silly when tall buildings pretend they don't have a 13th floor and call it 14 instead. And yet, according to the Otis Elevator Company, about 85% of tall buildings in the US do this. Triskidekophobia, that's a fear of the number 13. In China, it's the number four that's considered unlucky. Again, personally, I don't have a problem with any number. I do refrain from walking under ladders, but that's just common sense. I don't want a brick or a hammer to fall down, hit me on the head. So the standard superstitions, they just don't move me.

• 0:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  For instance, I pay zero attention to my horoscope, although that is such a Virgo thing to say. What about you? Are you superstitious? We put this question to our listeners.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  You better knock on wood, or you're gonna break a bone.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  I went out to dinner and noticed that my tip rented out to $6.66, which is the devil's number.

• 1:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Those are typical superstitions. We heard some unusual ones, too. Here's a listener named Maria.

• 1:20Speaker 03

  If you lick food off of a knife, it'll make you a cruel and mean person.

• 1:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  And Andrew.

• 1:27Speaker 04

  The most superstitious person I know is my mother-in-law, who won't kill a cricket because it is unlucky. And she won't put her wallet or purse down on the ground because it brings ill fortune upon the family.

• 1:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  And here's my favorite, from Meredith, actually Meredith's mom.

• 1:43Speaker 05

  When somebody did something wrong to her, she would write their name down on a little slip of paper, and she would put it inside of a cup and stick that into the freezer. And this would curse them. We don't know where this freezer magic cursing tradition came from, but she would go so far as to put the license plate number of someone who cut her off in traffic on a piece of paper in the freezer.

• 2:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  According to the market research firm Ipsos, 21% of Americans believe in spells or witchcraft. 36% believe in ghosts. Roughly 40% believe in UFOs. Although I would argue that believing in UFOs is categorically different from ghosts and witches. Meanwhile, nearly 30% of Americans do believe in astrology, unlike me, and that belief has been rising. An astrology app called CoStar has over 20 million downloads and last year it raised $15 million in venture capital. The psychic services industry is worth about $2 billion. So what are we to make of this intense belief in the supernatural?

• 2:48Speaker 06

  It is irrational and yet it's very popular.

• 2:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Stuart Vies. He is a retired psychology professor and author of a book called "Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition."

• 3:00Speaker 06

  Many people are superstitious, probably more than admit to it. I've seen a number of surveys over the years that suggest that roughly 50% of people will admit to being at least a little superstitious.

• 3:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Among wealthy countries, the US is disproportionately high on superstitious belief. We are also disproportionately high on religiosity, which may not be a coincidence. Believing in ghosts doesn't seem all that different from believing in angels. We asked Vies for some further thoughts about the types of people likely to hold superstitions.

• 3:38Speaker 06

  There are some studies that suggest that among college students, humanities majors and art majors are more likely to be superstitious than natural science majors. But everyone is susceptible and there are plenty of superstitious scientists out there. I remember working in a lab once where we had this elaborate equipment that had this lore about don't do this because the machine won't work right and so forth. And it was almost like some kind of a primitive incantation that you had to do in order to make sure the equipment would work properly. And so clearly scientists are susceptible as well.

• 4:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today on Freakonomics Radio, superstition in places you wouldn't expect.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  The embracing of superstition at the official courtroom level isn't totally rejected in the American legal system.

• 4:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  We'll talk about why we believe even when the evidence argues against it.

• 4:34Speaker 07

  We naturally, as humans, tend to build stories and tales around the things that are really impactful to us.

• 4:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  And the history of superstitions, curses, and maledictions.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  May they be cursed in the head and the brain. May they be cursed in fields and in pastures.

• 4:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  What do broken-hearted knitters, urinating goalkeepers, and the CIA have in common? We'll tell you all that right after this.

• 5:18Speaker 08

  This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 5:33Speaker 06

  This is a very common thing, where people will say, I know this is silly, but I just don't want to take a chance.

• 5:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  That, again, is the psychologist Stuart Vize.

• 5:44Speaker 06

  We are of two minds, often.

• 5:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  When he says we are of two minds, he is thinking of something specific about how our cognition works.

• 5:53Speaker 06

  The common view of cognition these days is the idea that we have System One, which is an intuitive system of thinking that doesn't engage the heavy machinery, versus System Two, that is logical, can calculate, and so forth.

• 6:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  You may be familiar with System One and System Two from the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

• 6:16Speaker 06

  For some people, I think that these two are in conflict when it comes to superstitions.

• 6:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  And therefore, Weis argues, the belief in superstitions is not so black and white. There is a lot of gray area.

• 6:28Speaker 06

  I would never really encourage someone to be superstitious. I think that we need more reason and rationality in the world in general. But having said that, it's clear that they have psychological benefits for some people. Rituals of any kind, and religious rituals certainly fit into this category, can have these benefits, lower anxiety, feeling good.

• 6:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Weis argues that a superstition can be especially helpful in a stressful or high stakes setting. With so much on the line, you want to do whatever you can to gain a bit more control. Think about a high stakes political election.

• 7:06Speaker 06

  One of the more famous political superstitions is Barack Obama's need to play basketball on Election Day. He started this superstition when he played a game on the day of the Iowa caucuses in the 2008 campaign, and he won that caucus. And then, for whatever reason, he failed to organize a pickup game on the next contest, which was the New Hampshire primary, and he lost to Hillary Clinton. And so from that point on, it was locked in. He never had an election day without a basketball game.

• 7:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Many professional athletes have their own rituals. Serena Williams, for instance, wears the same socks when she's on a winning streak. The baseball player Wade Boggs famously ate chicken before every game. And before every at bat, he would draw the Hebrew letter hi in the dirt with his bat, even though he is not Jewish. Sports fans are, of course, also superstitious. Here's what we heard from a listener named Kayla. She and her family are fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

• 8:13Speaker 09

  There was a time where I think it was the Super Bowl and my grandmother was in the bathroom when we got a touchdown and the entire family told her, no, you have to stay in there because we scored.

• 8:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Pittsburgh Steelers have won six Super Bowls. No team has won more. Wade Boggs was inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame. Serena Williams is one of the best tennis players ever. So do these superstitions work?

• 8:43Speaker 06

  Studies of athletes can only be correlational. The studies that have been done show that the better performing athletes are more likely to be superstitious than the ones who are not doing well. But that doesn't really show us that superstitions work. It just shows us that good players have them.

• 9:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  In other words, mediocre and bad athletes probably have superstitions as well. We just don't hear about them.

• 9:09Speaker 10

  What a lot of superstition in sport is about is the idea that the athlete can control it by a particular action.

• 9:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Stefan Shymansky, an economist at the University of Michigan who studies and follows a variety of sports.

• 9:23Speaker 10

  In a sport that I like, cricket, there are an awful lot of examples. There's a very famous superstition surrounding a particular score in cricket. Lots of runs are scored in cricket. And when a particular total where the three digits are the same, 111, 222, 333, is called Nelson.

• 9:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  As in Admiral Nelson. Long story as to why it is named after Nelson. You can read about that on your own if you're so inclined. Anyway, the Nelson is not a lucky thing. It's unlucky.

• 9:56Speaker 10

  And there was one umpire in cricket who believed that this was so cursed that he had to hop up and down until the score passed beyond 111. So there are televised examples of this. You can see this guy jumping up and down.

• 10:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  The curse is a common form of sport superstition. Consider the curse of the bambino. That was the nickname for Babe Ruth, the best player in the early days of baseball and the most popular as well. Well, he was accordingly paid a very high salary and wanted even more. So his team, the Boston Red Sox, decided to sell his contract to the New York Yankees. This was in 1919. At this point, the Red Sox had been routinely winning World Series. The Yankees didn't have a single championship. After Ruth was sold, the two teams fortunes reversed. The Yankees, with Babe Ruth jumpstarting their success, would win eight World Series

• 10:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  over the next 20 years. They've since won 19 more, making them the winningest baseball team ever. The Red Sox, meanwhile, in the aftermath of letting Babe Ruth go, went 86 years without a championship. Their misery finally ended in 2004.

• 11:12Speaker 11

  Red Sox fans have longed to hear it. The Boston Red Sox are world champions.

• 11:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Finally set free from the curse of the bambino, the Red Sox would win the World Series again in 2007, 2013, and 2018. Other alleged curses, meanwhile, endure.

• 11:32Speaker 10

  One of my favorites is the Bobby Layne curse, which is believed to affect the Detroit Lions.

• 11:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Sheminski happens to live near Detroit, and he's co-author of a book called City of Champions about Detroit's sporting legends.

• 11:46Speaker 10

  Bobby Layne was the star quarterback of the 1950s, and he led the Lions to NFL championships. And then they traded him. And that was often blamed in the decades that followed for the poor performance of the team.

• 11:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  When Sheminski says "poor performance," that does not quite do justice to the Detroit Lions' record since they traded Bobby Layne in 1958. In the 63 seasons since, not only have the Lions not won a championship, or even made it to the championship game, they've had only 20 seasons with a winning record. In 2008, the Lions lost all 16 of their games. Meanwhile, the team that received Bobby Layne in 1958 was the Pittsburgh Steelers. As we noted earlier, the Steelers have since won six Super Bowls. This was probably because Kayla's grandmother agreed to stay in the bathroom all those years.

• 12:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Stefan Sheminski, however, he is not superstitious. He doesn't believe the Lions were cursed because they traded Bobby Layne.

• 12:50Speaker 10

  The fact is that the team has been so bad, the management of the team has been so awful, you don't need a curse to explain it.

• 12:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Still, why is sport such a magnet for curses and jinxes? Sheminski says it is based on a misunderstanding of probabilities.

• 13:07Speaker 10

  Up until the 16th century, people who gambled on dice thought that the outcome of throwing dice was governed by fate. And what changed was people started to think about counting what the possible outcomes are and thinking about probability. And that conflict between explaining outcomes through fate and through probability lies at the heart of our psychological attitude towards sports today, because the outcome of a sporting event is the combination of skill and luck. And the question is, what is governing that luck? People like me believe it's driven by probability, which is quantifiable, but a lot of people think it's driven by fate.

• 13:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, let me be the devil's advocate for a moment, or the curse's advocate. When you talk about the events that are uncontrollable, that are due to luck, or chance, or fate, whatever we'd like to call it, it strikes me that one of the most common of those in sport is injury. Very seldom does an athlete do something that concretely will lead to injury, and very rarely does an opponent specifically try to injure them. So if a player gets injured, particularly at an inopportune time, couldn't you chalk that up more to fate than probability?

• 14:25Speaker 10

  That, to me, is an empirical question. We should look at the data to see whether there are any systematic patterns. Big data has been in sport now for quite a while, and we're very good at honing down probabilities from these large quantities of data.

• 14:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Stefan, if I were to ask you what share Luck or chance plays in the outcome of a median sporting event. How would you think about that?

• 14:53Speaker 10

  Well, it very much depends on the sport. One of the key factors is how much scoring there is in a game. For example, in a professional basketball game, there's much less scope for luck to play a role because how the ball rolls against the rim can make an outcome to one basket, but it's unlikely to do so systematically over an entire game. Whereas in soccer, you know, a zero zero outcome is very common and just winning by one goal is the most common way of winning. Luck can play an awfully large part in the outcome.

• 15:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  It would seem then as though soccer is perhaps more amenable to curses or belief in curses than a sport like basketball. Is that true?

• 15:33Speaker 10

  It is. One of the weird ones, I don't know if you've heard this one, Liverpool Football Club, it wasn't until recently that they won the English Premier League Championship, and they'd been a dominant team in the seventies and eighties. And Bruce Grobelaar, the Zimbabwean goalkeeper, believed there was a curse which could only be broken if somebody urinated on all four goalposts at their home field in Anfield, which apparently was accomplished, I believe, by him.

• 16:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Lovely.

• 16:02Speaker 10

  Sometime a couple of years ago, which led up to them winning, of course, the English Premier League Championship.

• 16:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  I guess if one wanted to be sympathetic toward curses and the breaking thereof, one could imagine that, well, perhaps the opposing goalkeeper was drenched in the odor of urine the whole match and played poorly.

• 16:22Speaker 10

  All sorts of things are possible. I hate to be the dull rationalist here, but I think we're better off if people just believe that there's a rational world out there, which means you can disregard the curse.

• 16:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Among the most famous sports curses are the Sports Illustrated cover jinx and the Madden curse, which concerns the Madden Football video game. The idea is that when an athlete appears on the cover of Sports Illustrated or the Madden game, something bad will happen to that athlete, usually an injury.

• 16:55Speaker 10

  It's certainly the case that many of these players who appeared on the covers did get injured in the season following. So I got interested in trying to see whether I could draw out any statistical relationship here. So I put together a little dataset of these players' histories and then looked at the number of games that they played in a season and then included a specific variable to allow for the year you appeared on the Madden game. And it was, I have to say statistically insignificant. It didn't look like they were any more likely to play fewer games in that season than in any other, given their age and age profile. Bear in mind, by the time you get on to Madden, you'll usually

• 17:37Speaker 10

  have several years of experience and so you're already more likely to be prone to injury.

• 17:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  In other words, it's not a curse, it's just math.

• 17:46Speaker 10

  You're going to find it very hard to dissuade me from that position. That's what the data seems to say to me. Of course, you might come back and say, well, that's just a piece of faith on your part anyway, right?

• 17:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Sports Illustrated cover jinx is a bit different because they have many athletes on the cover in the course of a year and also they're typically being celebrated for some recent triumph. So if they perform worse afterwards or get injured, is that simply regression to the mean? They were doing much better than average to earn themselves onto the cover, then afterwards they they fall back to earth?

• 18:19Speaker 10

  Regression to the mean is certainly a credible explanation, particularly because when you get on to the cover, it's probably because there has been a significant jump in your performance in recent times. It's not the same as a constant upward trend.

• 18:35Speaker 10

  The other thing to say is, you know, there are lots of magazines published, there are thousands and thousands of opportunities to observe this kind of relationship. So the idea that once in a while it will appear in a particular case seems not surprising at all.

• 18:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  This tendency to seek out coincidence, to seek out what look like patterns, would seem to be ingrained in human psychology. Our psychologist friend Stuart Vies once designed an experiment to observe this.

• 19:08Speaker 06

  I asked college students to play a very simple video game where they were not told exactly how points were made on the game.

• 19:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Students had to press buttons to navigate a maze. In one condition of the experiment, the player would get a point whenever they made a correct move. But in another condition of the experiment...

• 19:29Speaker 06

  If I made the points come on a random schedule, they would come up with very strange theories about how it worked. Some students said, "You have to press the buttons very slowly or else it will go off." Others developed these strange patterns, and if you didn't do it exactly the right way, then you wouldn't get a point.

• 19:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  In other words, if you have enough incentive to look hard, you will find a pattern. Consider one recent cover of Sports Illustrated. It was their 2021 Olympic preview issue. It featured the American gymnast Simone Biles, who wound up dropping out of the team final in the Olympics to focus on her mental health, as she put it. So, does that count as the jinx at work? Or consider a recent NFL preview issue from Sports Illustrated. Its cover featured the long-suffering Cleveland Browns with the headline, "The Browns Are Back." But the Browns weren't back. That season, they won only six games and lost 10.

• 20:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Browns were a risky choice for Sports Illustrated to celebrate on their cover. Among the NFL teams who are nearly guaranteed to stink in a given year, the Browns are right up there. In the interest of full disclosure, I say this as a supporter of the aforementioned Pittsburgh Steelers. The Steelers and Browns have played each other 46 times since the year 2000. The Steelers have won 37 of the 46, with one tie. Again, this is probably all thanks to Kayla's grandmother.

• 21:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  In the second half of today's episode, the relationship between superstition and US law enforcement. And if you are a knitter, there is one thing you should never knit for your beloved if you want them to stay your beloved.

• 21:27Speaker 12

  The relationship will fall apart. That's what I've heard.

• 21:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's coming up right after this.

• 21:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  We've been talking about superstitions and curses. We should probably talk a bit about the history of curses.

• 21:54Speaker 06

  Curses have been with us probably since the beginning of civilization.

• 21:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  That again is the psychologist Stuart Vies.

• 22:03Speaker 06

  But they were very different in the ancient world. They were much more common in the ancient world. They tended not to be promoted by established elites or the established religion. They came from magicians from the street.

• 22:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Imagine you're walking home through the town square after a hard day of candle making or blacksmithing, and you are angry at someone. Maybe it's a lazy coworker or a corrupt politician. For a small fee, you could have one of these street magicians put a curse on this person. Let's say you curse them with scabies. Now, does the curse work? Do they actually get scabies? Even if not, think of the benefits. Curse benefit number one. You feel better just getting the anger off your chest. Curse benefit number two. You get to imagine this person suffering from scabies. If they actually get scabies, you can, of course, claim credit.

• 23:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  And curse benefit number three. You get to tell this person that you've put a curse on them. And now you've gotten inside their head, which is almost better than giving them scabies.

• 23:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  But ancient curses went beyond personal vendettas. Here is the economist Peter Leeson from George Mason University.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  My general sense is that belief in cursing performs an important governance function.

• 23:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Leeson is known for studying unusual topics: witch trials, gypsy law, the economics of pirates, and perhaps inevitably curses. So what does Leeson mean when he says that curses perform a governance function?

• 23:47Speaker 01

  When we have fewer resources available to us, when societies are poorer, we can't afford things like large professional police services and a professional judiciary and so on. So in that case, certain superstitions are relatively lower-cost ways of getting to the same kinds of outcomes.

• 24:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Think back to medieval Europe and the practice known as a trial by ordeal.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  What they would do, and by they, I mean clerics, it's clerics, priests who are administering all of these ordeals. Boil a pot of water, throw a stone or a ring into it, ask the defendant to plunge his arm into the water and pluck out the stone or ring. Then they would wrap up the defendant's arm and revisit it three days later. And if it was determined by the priest to be what they called foul within the wrapper, which is to say showing serious signs of having been burned, the defendant was guilty of the crime. And if there was no signs of injury, then he was considered innocent of the crime.

• 24:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that's one form of governance. Peter Leeson argues that curses also played a larger, more institutional role. For instance, in West Francia-

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Which was sort of the predecessor to the Kingdom of France.

• 24:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  And where power was concentrated among the royal, religious, and feudal elite, you had this situation-

• 25:05Speaker 01

  You had the situation where there were not effective public institutions to protect property rights.

• 25:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Meaning no police to call, no impartial courts to hear your claims, which gave opportunity to the bad guys, or what Leeson calls "strong men."

• 25:21Speaker 01

  The strong men posed a threat to people's property rights, and communities of monks and canons were among those who were most threatened.

• 25:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ordained monks and canons, all being members of the clergy.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  They were among the largest property holders in all of West Francia.

• 25:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  But holding property did not guarantee that these clerics would be protected from the strongmen.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Clerics didn't actually wield the means of self-protection physically. When you became a cleric, you gave up your arms and you gave up your horses and so on.

• 25:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  So how could these unarmed religious communities protect their property?

• 25:56Speaker 01

  What the communities of clerics did faced with an inability to rely on government to protect their property rights was that they resorted to reliance on divine curses. Those curses were often called maledictions. And what they did was call upon God or some of God's assistants, for example, saints, to unfurl fulminations that would harm the individuals who were depredating the cleric's property.

• 26:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Peter, could you read me one of these ancient maledictions?

• 26:26Speaker 01

  I could.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Okay. Here's a malediction that comes from the Abbey of Fechamp circa the late 10th century. "We curse them and we separate them from the company of the Holy Mother Church and of all faithful Christians, unless they change their ways and give back what they unjustly took away. May they be cursed in the head and the brain. May they be cursed in their eyes and their foreheads. May they be cursed in their ears and their noses. May they be cursed in fields and in pastures. May they be cursed when sleeping and when awake, when going out and returning, when eating and drinking, when speaking and being silent. May they be cursed in all times, in all places."

• 27:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so if I'm the local strongman, or let's say a strongman from two provinces over, do I care? Do I believe that these clerics have issued a malediction? Do I really think that's going to stop me from storming their castle and taking over their property?

• 27:27Speaker 01

  So it's critical that in order for these curses to have the ability to protect property rights, that their ostensible targets have some belief in the power of those curses to in fact harm them. And during the 10th through 12th centuries in France, there's pretty good reason to think that that would have been basically everyone who held that belief, the strong man included, because there was at this time, a very strong religious belief, a belief that was grounded in the Bible. And in the Bible, what you find is a curious mix of, you know, brotherly love and frightful wrath.

• 28:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  In other words, even the strong man, the bad guy, would have been scared enough of the curse that theoretically, the issuance of said curse would have acted to ensure the property rights of the clerics, yes?

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Exactly. So historians at least claim that strong men were in fact, to a large extent, deterred from plundering clerics' property as a result of these curses.

• 28:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  I've got to believe that there was a strong man at one point who was cursed and said, eh, forget it, I'm gonna take over the castle anyway, and did, and then wasn't struck down in the head and the eyes and the throat. And then everybody else would have said, ah, these curses, they're just language, they mean nothing. Did that not happen?

• 28:41Speaker 01

  It's hard to say. You're right that it probably did happen, but the scope for it to happen was extremely limited precisely because of the excessively vague, encompassing, and unverifiable nature of the curses. It ended literally with, may you be cursed in all times, in all places. At some point in your life, something bad is going to happen to you. When any bad thing happens to you at any point, it is possible for you to interpret it in light of what the curse said.

• 29:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's pretty clever.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Thanks. Wasn't my cleverness though, it was the monks.

• 29:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that was centuries ago, when the world was somewhat less orderly and much poorer.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  And then, as we become wealthier, we're able to substitute away from reliance on the superstition, towards reliance on these more secular, traditional means of protecting property rights.

• 29:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  More secular and traditional means like state-run courts and a modern law enforcement system. And yet, some relics of these superstitions remain.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  An example that's actually very similar is reliance on lie detector tests in the contemporary American criminal justice system. Lie detector tests are, in most cases, inadmissible. The inadmissibility is a function of the fact that lie detector tests are scientifically bogus, but they're heavily relied on in the background in the investigative phase. They're relied on by the FBI, by the police, by the CIA.

• 30:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that's because, this is Peter Leeson's argument at least, because if you are unwilling to take a lie detector test, it may signal that you have something to hide.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  It's as though our legal system doesn't want to go full bore. It doesn't want to embrace the absurdity of the fact that, hey, we're relying on superstition to improve things, but they're still letting it happen in the background. On the other hand, the embracing of superstition at the official courtroom level isn't totally rejected in the American legal system. There is, of course, Bible swearing, which has a very long history in our legal system.

• 30:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm curious if anyone's ever done a study on the incidence of perjury among those who've testified in a court, who swore on a Bible, who were believers in the Bible, and those who were atheists.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  That's a great idea. No, I don't know. It used to be mandatory to swear an oath on the Bible, but now for nonbelievers, you're permitted to swear an oath on, you know, some legal document or something instead. So there's still oath swearing. Maybe I'll just study that.

• 31:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Or perhaps Peter Leeson could study this.

• 31:18Speaker 07

  As soon as you start dipping your toes into the community, there are a lot of superstitions.

• 31:24Speaker 13

  People have warned me, it's risky. I mean, there's a lot of intimidation. It feels overwhelming.

• 31:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  What's the source of all this intimidation, risk, and superstition? I'll give you a hint. We were talking to customers at a craft shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan called Nitty City, and we were talking about something known as... The sweater curse. The sweater curse?

• 31:49Speaker 12

  The sweater curse.

• 31:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  The sweater curse is what?

• 31:52Speaker 12

  When you have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and you make a sweater for this boyfriend or girlfriend, then there's a curse. The relationship will fall apart.

• 32:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Why on earth would knitting a sweater for a loved one put a curse on the relationship? No one seems to know why, only that it does. We weren't able to locate any reliable data on the sweater curse, so we thought we'd learn what we could from an insider.

• 32:24Speaker 07

  My name is Ash Mirzajek, and I work at Knitty City and also as a knitting teacher. I've been a knitter for about eight or nine years now, and I've worked at yarn shops for about three years.

• 32:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mirzajek showed up to our studio interview in a shawl she had knitted herself. It was gorgeous and extremely detailed. Strands of magenta, yellow, white, a variety of textures, multicolored baubles. Now, why'd she choose to wear such a beautiful shawl for a radio interview?

• 32:58Speaker 07

  So you know how they tell you for an interview that you should put on some lingerie?

• 33:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  I will admit, I did not know that.

• 33:05Speaker 07

  It really is a huge confidence booster. It feels great.

• 33:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  And so today, with the shawl...

• 33:11Speaker 07

  I told my husband, I've got all my emotional support knitting on. It definitely makes me feel like something that I'm proud of is on display in a way that's very meaningful to me.

• 33:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  What do you think you would be doing, Ash, if you weren't working at Knitty City?

• 33:28Speaker 07

  Before I was a knitter, I was a corporate strategy consultant, so I'd probably be really miserable still. I'd probably be crunching numbers and not feeling too great about it.

• 33:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  So how did your personal knitting revolution happen? How did you take it up?

• 33:48Speaker 07

  As a corporate strategy consultant, I traveled a lot, a lot, a lot. There was a point in my life when I was commuting to Albany every day, so I spent about six hours a day on the train. And I was frankly just going bananas. So my boyfriend at the time thought I needed to chill out and bought me a sock knitting kit. You can't really start with socks unless you're a bit of a masochist. It's not the easiest thing to pick up off the bat. You knit with five needles at a time. So I just took two tiny needles and made a very long strip on the train. And when I got to the end of my ball, I unraveled the whole thing and started over. And a couple of times through that, I realized this is helping me be a lot more relaxed.

• 34:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did the boyfriend knit as well?

• 34:35Speaker 07

  He didn't. He is now the husband. He still doesn't craft, but he's very warm because I keep making him things. So it was a good investment in the long run.

• 34:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you ever knit him a sweater?

• 34:47Speaker 07

  I have not. I've made him scarves, hats, quarter of a sock.

• 34:54Speaker 07

  Mostly scarves and hats.

• 34:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mirza Jack has knitted several sweaters, just not for her husband. She told us a sweater is one of the most complicated projects a knitter can take up. It requires a certain mastery just to get the shape right, and it's also expensive. The sweaters she has made have cost as much as $150 in materials, and they took between 50 and 100 hours of labor.

• 35:20Speaker 07

  I've done the math before for Curious Family, asking me why I don't sell my sweaters. One sweater I would personally sell for about $1,500. I would increase the price if the yarn was black and I was going blind knitting it. I would increase the price if it was a very complex pattern.

• 35:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Ash, I assume you've heard of the sweater curse?

• 35:47Speaker 07

  Oh, yes, definitely.

• 35:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you believe in it?

• 35:51Speaker 07

  I don't believe that there's a supernatural reason for the sweater curse, but I do believe that it's a very real crushing disappointment that you as a knitter can experience and that we naturally as humans tend to build stories and tales around the things that are really impactful to us.

• 36:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, Ash, you say you don't really believe in the sweater curse, but you and your husband have a relationship that was formed with knitting as a component, and yet you've never knitted your husband a sweater. So persuade me that a little piece of you doesn't believe in the sweater curse.

• 36:34Speaker 07

  I'll give you my reasons. I might not believe that the sweater is out to get you, but I do believe that the act of making a sweater is a major commitment and a large undertaking. To make somebody else a sweater, you have to understand what they like, whether the yarn is suitable to their touch and to their sense of style, what colors do they like? And then after you've made all of these calculations, it comes down to sitting down and spending an enormous amount of your physical labor and your emotional labor on something that may or may not have that same value for that person.

• 37:19Speaker 07

  There's a lot of potential heartbreak that you're setting yourself up for. My husband has very simple taste and he would love to have a light, simple, basic sweater with nothing too fancy going on.

• 37:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that's just too boring for you?

• 37:35Speaker 07

  It's too boring and if it's light, then that means you're using thinner yarn and you're knitting a heck of a lot more. So I'm looking at a six-month commitment for a very simple, plain sweater that I could actually just buy.

• 37:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  There are a number of rational explanations for the sweater curse. It could be the result of confirmation bias. Once you believe in the sweater curse and you hear about a couple that broke up in the aftermath of a sweater being knitted, you might naturally attribute that breakup to the sweater. It could also be that breakups involving a hand-knit sweater are simply more dramatic and memorable than breakups in which a sweater is not involved. But the best explanation, as with the other curses we've been discussing today, may be basic math.

• 38:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  As Mirzajek told us, a sweater takes a long time to knit by hand. Unless you're knitting full-time, it could easily take a year. According to research by the sociologist, Michael Rosenfeld, 60% of new couples don't last a year. So if you decide to knit a sweater for your new boyfriend or girlfriend, there's a pretty good chance your relationship will be done before the sweater is. So yeah, maybe sweaters aren't so cursey after all. But this does raise the question of whether the intended recipient of a given piece of knitting is what knitters like to call knit-worthy.

• 39:11Speaker 07

  Knit-worthy is the idea that a person receiving a hand-knit gift needs to have a certain amount of both understanding and appreciation for what went into making that gift that makes it a step apart from a gift that you might have purchased. If I spend, you know, three, four weeks of my life doing the same repetitive motion, putting my labor and my emotions into something for you, and you you like it, and you're just like, great, thanks. That's nice. That rings a little hollow for most makers.

• 39:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  I don't blame you. I have to say, one of my favorite possessions in all the world is something my wife knitted for me. I don't know what it's called. It's a circular scarf that you pull over your head and it keeps your neck and throat nice and toasty. Like, I can't wait for the cold weather because I basically put it on in November and I leave it on until May. It's a little woolly. I mean, it's wool.

• 40:18Speaker 07

  It hugs you back.

• 40:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  It hugs you back. And it is such a thing. It's almost like a pet. I know it's not quite human, but it's imbued with all this love and life and I can't imagine a gift that's more.

• 40:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Alive in a way, other than, you know, the fact that it's not alive. So what you're saying really resonates with me. I hope I'm noteworthy.

• 40:44Speaker 07

  You sound very noteworthy. The fact that you treasure it and value it as something that is special due to the fact that the person who made it for you, made it with love and made it with hard work. That makes you noteworthy.

• 41:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Ash Mirzajek, like our other guests today, is a skeptic of curses. There is always a rational explanation. But still, rationality aside, I was curious whether anyone we spoke with harbors even the slightest superstitious belief. First up, the sports economist Stefan Sheminski. Does he have any superstitions?

• 41:30Speaker 10

  No, I don't. And I don't believe in magic. Harry Potter is great fun, but it's a story. It's not for real.

• 41:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you ever wish you were a little more inclined toward magic or superstition just because it's interesting?

• 41:44Speaker 10

  I actually find data interesting. I find statistics interesting. I find spreadsheets interesting. So I get enough thrill out of looking at that without the need for the extraneous.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  I do many, many things for pure entertainment value.

• 42:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that's Peter Leeson, the economist who believes that curses used to perform important governance functions.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  So that would be like the fortune cookie. Do I really believe that it's actually telling my future? No, it's tricky because I believe in God. I'm Catholic. And so, you know, that's the obvious answer for me is I'm Catholic and therefore everything that I believe is superstitious according to my definition. I'm not Catholic for fun, I guess. It doesn't have entertainment value to me, but it does have aesthetic value. It does have these other sources of value that matter to me.

• 42:38Speaker 06

  I think that I'm a fairly rational person.

• 42:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that's Stuart Vies, the psychologist who studies superstition.

• 42:45Speaker 06

  But I do remember a very bumpy airplane ride, and I do not do well with turbulence. So I was sort of white knuckling it through this ride. And my friend turned to me and said, Stuart, did you notice that we're in the 13th row? And he said, and not only that, but look out the window, there's a full moon out there. And for a moment, I caught my breath and felt nervous. And then I realized, well, wait a second. If this plane goes down, all of the rows are going down, not just this row. And so I got over it fairly quickly. But it shows that under the right circumstances, we're all capable of some kind of superstitious belief.

• 43:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Are we all capable of some kind of superstitious belief? I didn't think I was, but during the course of these conversations, I remembered. Many years ago, I was writing a book about my childhood football hero, Franco Harris of the Pittsburgh Steelers. I had gone to visit Franco's mother, Gina, who still lived in the same house where she raised Franco and all her other kids. She grew up in Pietra Santa, Italy, and she still had a lot of old world ways. My own mother had recently died, and Gina reminded me of her. Physically tiny, but strong and boisterous, fun to be with, but also you had better do what they said.

• 44:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gina Harris and I went out for lunch at an Italian restaurant near her house. It was a nice room, pink tablecloths, starched napkins. She ordered a glass of wine with lunch. I didn't. Once the waiter poured her wine, I lifted my glass of water to clink her glass. She said, no, never with water. That is very bad luck. I had never heard of a curse associated with raising a glass of water, but I never forgot it either. And now I realize I have passed it on to my entire family. If you come to dinner at our house and raise a glass of water for a cheers, you will get a talking to.

• 44:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I guess I am a believer in some limited way. Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, one city in the US is growing so fast that it's been declared the model city for 21st century America. So, we called up the mayor of this city.

• 45:12Speaker 14

  Look, if you want to be in a place where you're going to get the best value, you can't beat [bleep].

• 45:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  No, we're not going to give it away, just like that. Anyway, this mayor wanted us to come visit.

• 45:27Speaker 14

  I'll come get you from the airport.

• 45:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  For the first time since the pandemic started, Freakonomics Radio hits the road to see if the city of [bleep] is really as great as everyone says. There were some encouraging signs.

• 45:41Speaker 14

  It's a really friendly place. I mean, noticeably friendly.

• 45:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  But the evidence was mixed.

• 45:47Speaker 15

  I still sometimes cry myself to sleep because I live here.

• 45:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else, too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. We can be reached at [email protected]. This episode was produced by Zach Lipinski. We had help this week from Jeremy Johnston. Our staff also includes Alison Kreglow, Greg Rippon, Mary Duke, Ryan Kelly, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Morgan Levy, Emma Terrell, Jasmine Klinger, Eleanor Osborne, Lyric Bowditch, and Jacob Clemente. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers. All the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can get the entire archive of Freakonomics Radio on any podcast app. If you'd like a transcript

• 46:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  or show notes, go to Freakonomics.com. As always, thank you for listening.

• 46:40Speaker 07

  He'll get a sweater eventually. I have a few decades left in me.

• 46:48Speaker 08

  The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.

• 46:56Speaker 09

  Stitcher.