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In 1948, behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner published an article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, in which he described his pigeons exhibiting what appeared to be superstitious behavior. One pigeon was making turns in its cage, another would swing its head in a pendulum motion, while others also displayed a variety of other behaviors. Because these behaviors were all done ritualistically in an attempt to receive food from a dispenser, even though the dispenser had already been programmed to release food at set time intervals regardless of the pigeons' actions, Skinner believed that the pigeons were trying to influence their feeding schedule by performing these actions. He then extended this as a proposition regarding the nature of superstitious behaviour in humans

Skinner's theory regarding superstition being the nature of the pigeons' behavior has been challenged by other psychologists such as Staddon and Simmelhag, who theorised an alternative explanation for the pigeons' behavior.

Despite challenges to Skinner's interpretation of the root of his pigeons' superstitious behavior, his conception of the reinforcement schedule has been used to explain superstitious behavior in humans. Originally, in Skinner's animal research, "some pigeons responded up to 10,000 times without reinforcement when they had originally been conditioned on an intermittent reinforcement basis. Compared to the other reinforcement schedules (e.g., fixed ratio, fixed interval), these behaviors were also the most resistant to extinction. This is called the partial reinforcement effect, and this has been used to explain superstitious behavior in humans. To be more precise, this effect means that, whenever an individual performs an action expecting a reinforcement, and none seems forthcoming, it actually creates a sense of persistence within the individual. This strongly parallels superstitious behavior in humans because the individual feels that, by continuing this action, reinforcement will happen; or that reinforcement has come at certain times in the past as a result of this action, although not all the time, but this may be one of those times.