Why are some people so superstitious?

I don't know, op. I'm a completely rational person and I work in academia. However, I never lost my childhood fear of the dark, of possible monsters and ghosts lurking, waiting to harm me. I can't even watch a horror movie, it's too much for me. Why is that? I can't tell you. There will always be that chill the unknown and the thought of death will give us, humans. There will always be that part of our lizard brain that's waiting for the danger from behind. There will always be our imagination, seeing faces in the shadows. The thought that we are fully rational masters of the universe is an illusion.

Here you go, OP

Another cursedly dull thread.

My work here is nearly done.

Women will believe any old shit. Look at every moral panic and mass hysteria in history.

Every living person is superstitious. You may be trained to look down on people who observe certain superstitions, but you are superstitious in some ways and either just don't recognize it or else you are in denial about it.

It's not a matter of being smart or dumb. This is a natural way of thinking. Our minds are trained to identify patterns and to associate them causally with events as a matter of hedging bets and staying safe from dangers.

If you've ever experienced a lucky streak, you're being superstitious.

If you've ever experienced a period of lots of bad things happening at once and nothing good happening, you've thought superstitiously.

And even if you deny it, you have made probably unfounded connections between doing X (or avoiding doing X) because you wonder, just wonder, if Y happens as a result.

You can deny this and lie about it to yourself, but you've done it and you'll keep doing it. It is just a part of how our minds work. It's not bad and it can be good at times because it makes us conscious of our thoughts, behaviors and actions and how they relate to events that happen in our lives.