Complex Numbers

Triskaidekaphobia

Feeling lucky?

Why is 13 considered unlucky? Explaining the power of its bad reputation  

I'm guessing it's because when you run out of fingers and feet to count, you're boned.

According to the Otis Elevator Co., for every building with a floor numbered “13,” six other buildings pretend to not have one, skipping right to 14.

Knowing that the 14th floor is really the 13th could lead one to believe that the 14th is the unlucky floor, if people were logical. Then again, if people were logical, well, you know.

Many Westerners alter their behaviors on Friday the 13th. Of course bad things do sometimes happen on that date, but there’s no evidence they do so disproportionately.

But when they do, they remember it disproportionately. This is a variant of confirmation bias, kind of like Blue Car Syndrome.  

As a sociologist specializing in social psychology and group processes, I’m not so interested in individual fears and obsessions. What fascinates me is when millions of people share the same misconception to the extent that it affects behavior on a broad scale. Such is the power of 13.

If enough people believe something, it gives that something a kind of reality. Kind of like when a winter storm is coming, and you're terrified that the store will run out of French toast supplies, so you run out and buy extra bread, milk, and eggs—which of course makes the store run out of French toast supplies.

The source of 13’s bad reputation – “triskaidekaphobia” – is murky and speculative.

And just as with triskaidekaphobia (one of the few words I can never spell correctly unless it's staring me in the face) itself, people will latch on to an explanation and stick with it in the face of any new evidence. Hell, I do it myself; I'm convinced that it's a relic of the Sumerian counting system, upon which we base our clocks. There's a reason 11 and 12 have their own words that don't end in "-teen."

The historical explanation may be as simple as its chance juxtaposition with lucky 12.

Which might make some sort of sense if people were even a little bit scared of 11, but they're generally not.

Joe Nickell ... points out that 12 often represents “completeness”: the number of months in the year, gods on Olympus, signs of the zodiac and apostles of Jesus. Thirteen contrasts with this sense of goodness and perfection.

Except that there's about 13 months in a year, if one goes by lunar months. And the apostles thing is disputable; it's quite likely that the number of apostles was codified at 12 to fit the "compleness" argument, and not vice-versa. Twelve is just a fun and easily divisible number, as has been known since ancient times (again, Sumerians), while 11 and 13 are both primes.

But the truth is, sociocultural processes can associate bad luck with any number. When the conditions are favorable, a rumor or superstition generates its own social reality, snowballing like an urban legend as it rolls down the hill of time.

It's not just bad luck. Lots of numbers, especially smaller ones, have well-known folk associations, irrespective of their usefulness in mathematics. Three, for instance, is the Trinity and the mind/body/spirit beliefs. Four is the number of classical elements, and has associations with the Divine in Western religions; it's also unlucky in parts of Asia (I've stayed in Chinese-owned hotels in the US that don't have a fourth floor, much as many US-owned buildings don't have a 13th). Five is associated with our fingers, and also plays heavily in religious and spiritual symbolism (the pentagram). And so on. The point being that regardless of objective reality, some people believe in all of these associations.

In Japan, 9 is unlucky, probably because it sounds similar to the Japanese word for “suffering.” In Italy, it’s 17. In China, 4 sounds like “death” and is more actively avoided in everyday life than 13 is in Western culture – including a willingness to pay higher fees to avoid it in cellphone numbers. And though 666 is considered lucky in China, many Christians around the world associate it with an evil beast described in the biblical Book of Revelation. There is even a word for an intense fear of 666: hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia.

My spell checker just rattled, sputtered and smoked.

There are many kinds of specific phobias, and people hold them for a variety of psychological reasons.

There are also levels of phobia, I think (I'm no expert). I've admitted before that I'm absolutely terrified of anything touching my eyeballs. I think many people are at least a little freaked out by the concept, but mine is extreme—though I did manage to make it through eye surgery without losing too much of my shit. Thanks, Valium!

Part of 13’s reputation may be connected to a feeling of unfamiliarity, or “felt sense of anomaly,” as it is called in the psychological literature. In everyday life, 13 is less common than 12. There’s no 13th month, 13-inch ruler, or 13 o'clock.

Never read Nineteen Eighty-Four, or joined the military, did you?

People also may assign dark attributes to 13 for the same reason that many believe in “full moon effects.” Beliefs that the full moon influences mental health, crime rates, accidents and other human calamities have been thoroughly debunked. Still, when people are looking to confirm their beliefs, they are prone to infer connections between unrelated factors. For example, having a car accident during a full moon, or on a Friday the 13th, makes the event seem all the more memorable and significant. Once locked in, such beliefs are very hard to shake.

Which is what I was saying up there.

Then there are the potent effects of social influences. It takes a village – or Twitter – to make fears coalesce around a particular harmless number. The emergence of any superstition in a social group – fear of 13, walking under ladders, not stepping on a crack, knocking on wood, etc. – is not unlike the rise of a “meme.”

Goddammit all to hell, that is the actual definition of a meme. Fortunately, the article goes on to explain that, and even credits Dawkins properly.

Also, there are good, practical reasons not to walk under ladders. And I was very, very disappointed when, as a child, my mother's back flat-out refused to break when I'd deliberately stomp on cracks when she pissed me off (that might have been the start of my skepticism about folk "wisdom.")

I'm looking at my black cat right now, though. She must have crossed my path 13 times yesterday, and I don't feel any unluckier than usual.

Anyway, the article ends by reiterating that despite not having any basis in objective reality, superstitions are hard to displace and can have very real consequences. My black cat, for instance: black cats tend to be adopted less frequently than other cats because of the idiot superstitions surrounding them. Well, their loss is my gain; Robin is a good kitty. Here's a poem I wrote about her, with picture:

STATIC

Cat in the Sink  (ASR) Some ideas are more amusing in theory than in practice. #2183875 by Robert Waltz

In the end, 13 is just another number, and Friday the 13th is just another day on the completely made-up calendar. There's one next month, in fact. It being January, it's very likely that it will snow somewhere in the US that day. If so, I'll bet people will complain that it happened because it's Friday the 13th. Never mind the snowstorm that paralyzed part of the country on Christmas Eve, which practically no one considers an unlucky day, and besides, a "white Christmas" is supposed to be a good thing—just don't tell that to the unlucky folks in Buffalo.