Sometimes you can believe the right thing for the wrong reason.

It's dangerous to encourage people to believe false things (or quietly fail to correct false beliefs) if they lead to correct conclusions though. Such strategies may work in the short term, but the world is chaotic, and generally a wrong-but-helpful belief today will become a wrong-and-harmful belief tomorrow.

We learned this with the whole 2020-era attempt to try to convince people that covid is not airborne so that people would not hoard masks and leave them for emergency staff. It ended up leading to really harmful misconceptions that are still persisting.

This remind me of the experiment “Superstition in the Pigeon” conducted by psychologist B.F. Skinner in 1947. In this experiment, Skinner placed pigeons in a box where food was delivered at regular intervals, regardless of the pigeons’ behavior. The pigeons started associating their random actions (like wing flapping or turning in circles) with the food delivery, mistakenly believing their actions caused the reward. This demonstrated how animals, including humans, can develop superstitious behaviors when they incorrectly link their actions to outcomes.