Cursed for life?
(Play the song for nice superstition vibes)
We humans
have a lot of superstitions. People in Western cultures might avoid walking underneath a ladder or feel bad for breaking a mirror, with fear for calling bad luck (or worse ¬‿¬ ) on themselves. People in Southern cultures wear red armbands to ward off evil or avoid eating watermelons at night. We see superstitions everywhere. We have been brought up with them and apply them without our conscious knowledge.
A formal definition of superstition is that it is "a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or change, or a false conception of causation" [1]. You'd think therefore that superstitions can only appear in creatures that experience fear or believe in supernatural forces.
Robots, however, do not feel the need to avoid certain places or actions, wear specific clothing or change their behaviour in general. If they do, it is because they are programmed to. But they do not need it.
Do humans need it to cope with unfavourable outcomes?
Interestingly, in the V2_Lab (where we will have our Science to Experience exposition) people have touched upon the topic of robots and superstition.
In their project they made an algorithm that avoids using certain unlucky numbers, such as 13, makes decisions based on lunar cycles, and eventually creates its own superstitious logic.
From this point of view, superstition almost creates some sort of randomness. Robots in general are not random, pseudo-random at most, when they generate random numbers from a set of previously chosen numbers.
For my own superstitious creature, I have two ideas. Either a creature has all the superstitions that are known in the world, and we could see how these superstitions interfere with each other. Another idea is to make up our own superstitions and give it to the creature to see how it goes about.
Of course it would be cool if the creature would create its own superstitions in time.
Superstitious robots
I could find awefully little about robots within this topic, but came across this trailer in case you're interested.
Reference
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/superstition#:~:text=%3A%20a%20belief%20or%20practice%20resulting,despite%20evidence%20to%20the%20contrary