Men who receive a positive foretelling of their future are more likely to gamble greater sums of money even when they don’t believe in fortunetelling, according to a new study. But there seems to be no such reaction among women.

The research highlights a curious aspect of human behavior: People tend to follow superstitions whether they profess to believe in them or not.

Psychologists think this might be because they want to maintain an illusion of control, which the superstition gives them, or that they want to impose a sense of order as a psychological defense to random events, which looks the same to an observer as adherence to superstition.