From the start of the semester, I’ve been marching over the compass at Locust Walk and 37^th Street as though that were a statement of fierce rationality.

When walking with another freshman, I would sometimes find us getting farther and farther apart as we neared the compass; I would head proudly on over it while my companion shied around the outside of the circle and rejoined me on the other side. These awkward divergences were annoying, especially on a crowded walk in the middle of a conversation. But as much as some people entirely avoided the compass, I wouldn’t go around it. Once I jumped on it in front of a horrified friend. I even went out of my way to walk over its slippery surface in the rain.

I was determined to prove the superstition wrong. I was going to walk all over the compass and still do outstandingly well on my first midterm.

In the end, I did do well on that midterm. When I got my bluebook back, I thought, “I guess this proves that stupid superstition wrong.” There was no way that scuffed-up symbol of destiny could have directed my fate. I was proud that I hadn’t been affected by this fallacy that had so deeply pervaded the consciousness of the freshman class. But finding out the results of my little experiment also made me wonder – can even an unyielding belief in free will constitute a superstition? Could my belief that, by walking over the compass every day, I would ace my midterm and break its curse possibly put me in the same category as those people who refused to touch it?

Something a history professor said made me think that it could. But that insight had to come all the way from the middle ages.

Back when the Black Death came around every generation or so to wipe out a considerable part of Europe and Asia, people tried to deal with the medical crisis and other less serious ones in ways that seem ludicrous to the modern mind. Doctors told the sick that vultures’ tendons would treat gout, sprinkling rosewater would ward off airborne diseases, and carrying precious stones like emeralds and sapphires would provide immunity from the plague. Though they weren’t considered superstitious then, today we see these magical connections made between treatment and disease as irrational and irrelevant. It doesn’t make sense, based on our knowledge of contagion and the immune system, that holding a rock could help treat a bacterial infection. But if a sick shopkeeper in 1368 managed to get a hold of an emerald and survived the plague (as some did), did his belief in the powers of the stone actually help him get better?

My history professor suggested that the answer was yes: conviction can be a powerful thing.

So, did my obsessive walking over the compass actually help me succeed? I think so. And if that was the case, then the compass had had a much greater influence on me than I thought.

In the case of the shopkeeper, expectation of recovery might have helped the man recover. For me, my expectation of foiling the compass pushed me to do well on my exam. It wasn’t only my aptitude, but also my anticipation of success that had had control over my midterm results.

So maybe, it’s not a question of being superstitious or not. Maybe, even if you espouse the opposite of something, you’re still operating in the same spectrum of ideas. By rejecting one superstition, you accept its inverse. Then, even a person who strongly believes in proving superstition wrong hasn’t escaped its hold on our psyches.

We didn’t leave superstition, or the power of suggestion, back in the plague-ridden middle ages—but this might not be so bad. The power of patient expectations still consistently produces the placebo effect in medical experiments today, letting patients experience natural relief from pain and other symptoms based only on suggestion. Conversely, a patient’s pessimistic attitude toward a drug that has no real chemical effect on the body can nevertheless produce negative physical effects.

The work of Stanford psychologist Claude Steele reminds us of the need to be aware of expectations in a different field. Steele found that African Americans who were told that some people would expect them to do poorly on academic tests did perform poorly. Testers who suggested to women that they were expected to do poorly on math tests got the same result. Steele called this phenomenon “stereotype threat.”

University of Arizona psychologists Michael Johns, Toni Schmader, and Andy Martens followed up this experiment and found that women who were warned about stereotype threat – that low expectations of them might affect their performance – ended up doing as well as men.

The research suggests that we need to be aware of the influence of society’s negative expectations in order to change them.

Whether in medicine or in our daily lives as college students, expectations strongly influence results. We have to admit sometimes that the compass has had some effect on us, however slight. And even if it doesn’t fully determine the direction of our success, much less our fate, the Locust Walk compass connects us in a deep-seated way with the university community, with everyone else who has aced or failed their first midterm with the old granite slab in mind.