Misurare il pensiero superstizioso nei bambini: validità e attendibilità della Superstitious Thinking Scale

Both adults and children show superstitious thinking, i.e. beliefs based on perceiving biased casual relationships between unrelated events (e.g., breaking a mirror or seeing a black cat crossing the street are associated with unlucky and potentially harmful consequences, as well as carrying a charm or crossing fingers are associated with beneficial consequences derived by actively fostering good luck). The aim of the present paper is the validation of the Italian version of the Superstitious Thinking Scale, a brief scale for children proposed by Kokis et al. (2002). The scale was administered to 1419 students attending primary and junior high school (aged between 8 and 16, M = 11.4; SD = 1.8) equally distributed by gender. Validity was tested defining its factorial structure by confirmative factor analysis techniques—that resulted to be unidimensional with a reliability comparable to the reliability of the original scale—and the nomological network of superstitious thinking was studied taking into account gender, age, cognitive ability, need for cognition and probabilistic reasoning. According to the literature, females showed higher superstitious thinking levels than males, superstitious thinking resulted to be inversely related to age, cognitive ability and probabilistic reasoning, and unrelated to need for cognition. The overall findings of the present study provide evidences of the validity and reliability of the Italian version of the Superstitious Thinking Scale for children, and the instrument key features are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).