Why We Throw Coins in Wishing Wells: A Cultural Explanation

Why do so many of us get pleasant, uncanny sensations when we throw a coin in a wishing well and see it resting in the water below? What’s the cultural psychology here? What do such coins have to do, for example, with rock concerts and the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life”?

Let's start by reviewing the shift in perspective that occurs when the coin moves out of our hands and into the fountain (or pond, but fountains make better pictures). When we grip that penny, nickel, dime, or other coin in our hands, we’re totally in control. The coin is literally “in the palm of our hands.” It’s also intimately connected with us through what anthropologists call "contagious magic," the principle that physical contact creates a bond between people and objects, a principle that's affirmed every time someone pays thousands of dollars for a piece of clothing worn by Jackie Robinson or John Lennon, or avoids the chair recently used by someone they don't like. The same principle applies to us ordinary people standing at the edge of the fountain. We’ve kept our coins close to our bodies in our pockets and purses, and now we're holding them in our hands. It’s fair to say that these coins have become an extension of ourselves at that moment—a light-hearted, personal avatar.

Then we throw the coin in the water and the whole picture changes. We lose control. We let go of our avatar, and suddenly it looks tiny in the water, much smaller than it did in our fingers a second ago. Often we can’t even be sure which coin is ours, lying there among all the others. Our individual coin is now just one of many. What do you call this reversal in perspective?

In a word: awe.

The essence of awe is marveling at a force greater than oneself, like looking up at the sky or ocean. Through the sudden miniaturization of the coin thrown in the fountain, we experience a hint of awe at the vastness of nature (water), which adds to our tingly, uncanny, magical sensations.

Most people probably wouldn't initially think of this coin throw as an experience of "awe" because it lacks the grand scale more typically associated with that word, such as taking in a panoramic view from a high mountain top. In fact, social psychologists studying awe have tended to use large-scale stimuli in their experiments, such as a 2015 study showing that subjects who watched videos of nature or gazed up at trees over 200 feet high, the tallest hardwoods in North America, were more likely to report feelings of awe and "the presence of something greater than myself" than control groups.

Still, a few years ago, when I asked Dacher Keltner, a leader of this research movement, if the same awe principle could be scaled down and applied to wishing wells, he agreed it could. And his statement was consistent with the position that he and co-author Jonathan Haidt took in their seminal paper on awe, where they noted that awe can also be elicited by beautiful art or music. The key point, they argued, is that true awe doesn’t just involve physical or even mental vastness, it also involves mystery—an element of incomprehension. For a real experience of awe, like looking at a sublime work of art, we have to confront something that we can’t quite wrap our minds around.

If fountain coins contain such a mystery, what is it?

In another word: society.

Mass society is simply too big for any of us to fully comprehend. You hear people talk about this thing called “American culture,” but you will never personally know the 300+ million people that make up this sprawling abstraction. (The United States is my primary example because that's the place I've studied the most, but these explanations could also be applied to other mass societies.) It’s not even possible to imagine all those people sitting in the same place. Yet when the coins from numerous strangers rest together in the fountain, we get to visualize the U.S. and our connection with each other.

It’s not a coincidence that the visualization combines water and money. Money only works if we trust each other, as anybody who has ever experienced a bank run can attest. And water is the life force that runs through our bodies and our entire planet. In an extended form of contagious magic, water physically envelopes and connects all those coin-avatars lying in the fountain. Seeing all that money in water, then, is like seeing American society, or whichever society is most relevant to the coin throwers.

In movie terms, the fountain coin pulls off the same feat accomplished by “It’s a Wonderful Life”: it infuses cold money with a sense of love and communal belonging, like that famous scene that makes practically everyone tear up, the final scene where the people of Bedford Falls shower George Bailey with their personal savings and save the bank.

The difference is that these bills connected George Baily with friends and family, whereas the fountain coins connect us with strangers. Fountains are more like “pay it forward” purchases for the next person in line, or like a sport event, rock concert, or political rally. In the best cases, being surrounded by all those strangers gives you a slight buzz, a giddy feeling, what the sociologist Durkheim long ago called “collective effervescence.” Fountain coins similarly provide collective effervescence, though, again, in a mild, controlled fashion.

Here, too, psychological experiments have given new life to anthropological insights. Keltner and his colleagues have shown, for example, that those research subjects who watched the nature videos or gazed at the tall trees were not only more likely than the control groups to say they felt awe, but also to agree with statements like "I feel part of some greater entity." And that greater entity wasn't just nature, it was also society. The subjects experiencing awe were more likely to act generously while later playing a game, and to help someone pick up the pens they dropped on the ground. In multiple experiments, these social psychologists have shown that awe correlates statistically with "pro-social behavior."

I would include wishing wells as "pro-social behavior," and the many students I've interviewed and surveyed over the past three years tend to agree. For example, over 90% of my undergraduate students, hailing from states all over the Western and Midwestern U.S., have reported that they would rather throw a coin in a fountain with many other coins already lying there, rather than one with just a few coins; and they said that in their lives they have only thrown coins in fountains or ponds where they could see the coin resting in the water, not oceans, rivers, or lakes. These two highly consistent answers support my argument that seeing one's coin merged with many others induces collective effervescence.

Of course, most people don’t walk around saying, “Look at all those coins in the fountain…What a great visual metaphor for society!” The resonance, if there is any, usually occurs at a hidden, unconscious level. Throwing a coin in a fountain just feels good and right, like enjoying a movie without having to consciously articulate why it moves you. What starts out as an individual act to attain private wishes ends up being a celebration of nature and community, and the positive feelings created through this act help explain its ongoing appeal all these years after most of us stopped believing in water deities.

Naturally there are variations in everything from culture areas to individual personalities. It would be interesting, for example, to investigate whether people in the U.K. have traditionally been more prone to throw coins in rivers and wells, where the coins disappear out of sight, because those bodies of water have more religious associations than the typically secular sites used in the U.S., such as fountains or ponds in shopping malls and state parks. Conversely, can the rising popularity in the U.K. of "coin-trees" be tied to increasing alienation and growing desires to visualize social connections?

Credit: . Ethan Doyle White, Wikimedia.org, Coin-Tree in Southwest England

Certainly these coins are highly visible, like the coins in American fountains, and archaeologist Ceri Houlbrook's excellent arguments about the participants "captivation" by coin patterns that they can't fully explain dovetail nicely with the above points about awe and collective effervescence.

In all these cases, it would also be worth investigating the undercurrents of ambivalence about capitalism (after all, the essence of the custom is throwing away money), government (that discarded money is government property), and science (we're thumbing our noses at scientific laws of cause and effect by toying with "superstitious" beliefs in wishing wells).

Obviously there's a lot of good further research to be done, but one thing is clear: experiencing awe and community for a penny is a pretty good deal.

Author Bio:

Peter Wogan's interest in wishing wells stems from over 10 years of fieldwork at a Mexican-American corner store in Salem, Oregon, which led him to consider similar questions about money, community, trust, and magic. For more details, see his book Corner-Store Dreams and the 2008 Financial Crisis: A True Story about Risk, Entrepreneurship, Immigration,and Latino-Anglo Friendship.