In this paper we test two hypotheses regarding magical thinking about theperceived likelihood of future events. The first is that people believe thatthose who “tempt fate” by failing to take necessary precautionsare more likely to suffer negative outcomes. The second is the“protection effect”, where reminding people of precautions theyhave taken leads them to see related risks as less likely. To this end, wedescribe the results from three attempted direct replications of a protectioneffect experiment reported in Tykocinski (2008) and two replications of atempting fate experiment reported in Risen and Gilovich (2008) in which we add atest of the protection effect. We did not replicate the protection effect butdid replicate the tempting fate effect.
