Exploring the Evil Eye Beliefs: A Quantitative Study

Abstract

The concept of the evil eye refers to the belief that gazes of individuals with envious feelings can have harmful effects on living and non-living entities. On this subject, there appears to be very few quantitative studies in literature. The aim of the present study was to investigate evil eye beliefs (EEBs) in Türkiye. A total of 601 participants (68.49% female, Mage = 27.92, SD = 10.03) completed measures of demographic information, benign envy, malicious envy, nonreligiousness-nonspirituality, and paranormal beliefs. The descriptive results showed that 58.65% of the participants endorsed the statement “I believe in the evil eye” and females had significantly stronger EEBs than males (d = 0.97, p