Foreign scientists have revealed the secret of the so-called Friday the 13th phenomenon - a common sign that on such a day one should be prepared for trouble and beware of failure.
Thomas Gilovich, head of the Department of Psychology at Cornell University in the US, believes that people are afraid of Friday the 13th because they are used to associating it with negative events. This was reported on the website of the Association for the Psychological Sciences of America.
"Our mind is an associative system, and if something bad happens to you on one of these Fridays, these two facts will always be inextricably linked in your mind. At the same time, you will subconsciously ignore all those Fridays that fall out on the 13th, when nothing terrible happened", the scientist explains.
Note that according to the Center for Stress Management and the Phobia Institute in North Carolina, between 17 million and 21 million people suffer from the fear of "damn" Friday. In medicine, this fear is considered as one of the phobias and is sometimes called paraskavedekatriaphobia (consisting of the Greek words for "Friday" and "thirteen").
Daniel Wegner, professor of psychology at Harvard, has spent several years studying the human trait of seeing cause and effect where none exists. According to him, people's thoughts are expressed in appropriate actions and actions, but thoughts can also provoke various events - both positive and negative.
"We may think that we are constantly attracting misfortune to us, but in fact we often think about them, after which they actually happen!" – the scientist notes. Thus, according to D. Wegner, something terrible can really happen to those who are truly afraid of Friday the 13th.
Add a comment