prompter: Are the seven years of bad luck after breaking a mirror a superstition or is it a true thing?

assistant: The belief that breaking a mirror will bring seven years of bad luck is a superstition. There is no scientific evidence or historical fact to support the idea that breaking a mirror will cause a person to experience seven years of bad luck. 

Superstitions like this one have been passed down through generations and are often based on old beliefs and folklore. They are not considered true in a scientific or rational sense.

prompter: How would I go about proving/disproving the claim about breaking a mirror?

assistant: As the belief of seven years of bad luck after breaking a mirror is a superstition, it cannot be scientifically proven or disproven. Superstitions are cultural beliefs that are passed down through generations but are not based on empirical evidence.

However, you can try to test the hypothesis by breaking a mirror and observing if you experience any instances of bad luck for seven years afterwards. Keep in mind, however, that such an experiment would not be scientifically valid, as it is subject to various biases and confounding factors that could influence the outcome.

In general, it is important to be cautious of making causal claims based on superstitions and to base our beliefs and decisions on evidence-based practices and scientific knowledge.

assistant: To prove/disprove this claim, you would need to conduct a long-term experiment.  You will need a test sample, possibly 10 or more You could gather a test sample of several people.  You would need some of these people to be a control group, who will not break mirrors.  You could even fake the breaking of a mirror for these people by having them drop a mirror out of the person's view, but preventing the mirror from actually breaking while playing the sound of a mirror shattering. In doing this you will have created a placebo group that you could compare against to see if the mirror actually shattering causes seven years of bad luck.  You will want the rest of the participants to actually break the mirror.  Next, you will need to follow participants for the next seven years and compare the lives of those who broke the mirror to those who did not.  If there is no significant difference in bad luck for the people that did break the mirrors verses the placebo group, then you have disproved the claim.  If there is a significant difference, then there would be reason to believe that it is true.  You could also follow the participants that broke mirrors for a few extra years to see if their luck improves or if they are naturally unlucky.

assistant: You could set up a double-blind scientific experiment with a control and a test group. You'll need a metric for "luck".

prompter: Wait, to make it double-blind, I'd need to (among other things) ensure the participants don't know if they're in control group or the test group. How do I go about that? Surely they'd know if they broke a mirror lately or not?

prompter: What is a double-blind experiment and how would I go about setting this up for the claim about breaking a mirror?

assistant: The belief that breaking a mirror brings seven years of bad luck is a superstition, not a scientifically proven fact. Superstitions are cultural beliefs or practices that are not based on scientific evidence and often originate from traditional customs or legends. They are often used to explain events or influence behavior in certain situations, but do not have any actual impact on real-life events.

prompter: Where does this belief come from?

assistant: Superstitions are often had to pin down to particular origins because of their nature as folk beliefs which are seldom written down. The Romans are the first culture known to have the mirror superstition, and the 7 year time limit is derived from the Roman belief that life takes 7 years to renew itself. The reasoning is harder to pin down. It's usually speculated that there was an explicit or implicit belief that your soul was in the mirror and breaking it caused some form of damage.

assistant: This belief is likely from folk tales where logic and reason are not always the primary subject, but rather to tell good stories that captivate the listener or reader.

assistant: There is no scientific evidence for the claim that breaking a mirror would result in seven years of bad luck, so it is safe to assume that the claim is false. Some people believe in the claim because it is human nature to attribute every event, good or bad, to something, even though the events are completely random. Once heard, the myth is self-perpetuating, because people who break a mirror will start attributing negative events that happen to them to breaking the mirror.