Re: The Magic Of Thinking Big
Fanny Lococo
Magical thinking, or superstitious thinking,[1] is the belief that unrelated events are causally connected despite the absence of any plausible causal link between them, particularly as a result of supernatural effects.[1][2][3] Examples include the idea that personal thoughts can influence the external world without acting on them, or that objects must be causally connected if they resemble each other or have come into contact with each other in the past.[1][2][4] Magical thinking is a type of fallacious thinking and is a common source of invalid causal inferences.[3][5] Unlike the confusion of correlation with causation, magical thinking does not require the events to be correlated.[3]
The precise definition of magical thinking may vary subtly when used by different theorists or among different fields of study. In anthropology, the posited causality is between religious ritual, prayer, sacrifice, or the observance of a taboo, and an expected benefit or recompense. In psychology, magical thinking is the belief that one's thoughts by themselves can bring about effects in the world or that thinking something corresponds with doing it.[6] These beliefs can cause a person to experience an irrational fear of performing certain acts or having certain thoughts because of an assumed correlation between doing so and threatening calamities.[1] In psychiatry, magical thinking defines false beliefs about the capability of thoughts, actions or words to cause or prevent undesirable events.[7] It is a commonly observed symptom in thought disorder, schizotypal personality disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.[8][9][10]
Bronisław Malinowski's Magic, Science and Religion (1954) discusses another type of magical thinking, in which words and sounds are thought to have the ability to directly affect the world.[11] This type of wish fulfillment thinking can result in the avoidance of talking about certain subjects ("speak of the devil and he'll appear"), the use of euphemisms instead of certain words, or the belief that to know the "true name" of something gives one power over it, or that certain chants, prayers, or mystical phrases will bring about physical changes in the world. More generally, it is magical thinking to take a symbol to be its referent or an analogy to represent an identity.
Sigmund Freud believed that magical thinking was produced by cognitive developmental factors. He described practitioners of magic as projecting their mental states onto the world around them, similar to a common phase in child development.[12] From toddlerhood to early school age, children will often link the outside world with their internal consciousness, e.g. "It is raining because I am sad."
Another theory of magical thinking is the symbolic approach. Leading thinkers of this category, including Stanley J. Tambiah, believe that magic is meant to be expressive, rather than instrumental. As opposed to the direct, mimetic thinking of Frazer, Tambiah asserts that magic utilizes abstract analogies to express a desired state, along the lines of metonymy or metaphor.[13]
An important question raised by this interpretation is how mere symbols could exert material effects. One possible answer lies in John L. Austin's concept of performativity, in which the act of saying something makes it true, such as in an inaugural or marital rite.[14] Other theories propose that magic is effective because symbols are able to affect internal psycho-physical states. They claim that the act of expressing a certain anxiety or desire can be reparative in itself.[15]
According to theories of anxiety relief and control, people turn to magical beliefs when there exists a sense of uncertainty and potential danger, and with little access to logical or scientific responses to such danger. Magic is used to restore a sense of control over circumstance. In support of this theory, research indicates that superstitious behavior is invoked more often in high stress situations, especially by people with a greater desire for control.[16][17]
Some scholars believe that magic is effective psychologically. They cite the placebo effect and psychosomatic disease as prime examples of how our mental functions exert power over our bodies.[20] Similarly, Robin Horton suggests that engaging in magical practices surrounding healing can relieve anxiety, which could have a significant positive physical effect. In the absence of advanced health care, such effects would play a relatively major role, thereby helping to explain the persistence and popularity of such practices.[21][22]
Ariel Glucklich tries to understand magic from a subjective perspective, attempting to comprehend magic on a phenomenological, experientially based level. Glucklich seeks to describe the attitude that magical practitioners feel what he calls "magical consciousness" or the "magical experience". He explains that it is based upon "the awareness of the interrelatedness of all things in the world by means of simple but refined sense perception."[23]
Another phenomenological model is that of Gilbert Lewis, who argues that "habit is unthinking". He believes that those practicing magic do not think of an explanatory theory behind their actions any more than the average person tries to grasp the pharmaceutical workings of aspirin.[24] When the average person takes an aspirin, he does not know how the medicine chemically functions. He takes the pill with the premise that there is proof of efficacy. Similarly, many who avail themselves of magic do so without feeling the need to understand a causal theory behind it.
In religion, folk religion, and superstitious beliefs, the posited causality is between religious ritual, prayer, meditation, trances, sacrifice, incantation, curses, benediction, faith healing, or the observance of a taboo, and an expected benefit or recompense. The use of a lucky charm or ritual, for example, is assumed to increase the probability that one will perform at a level so that one can achieve a desired goal or outcome.[25]
Prominent Victorian theorists identified associative thinking (a common feature of practitioners of magic) as a characteristic form of irrationality. As with all forms of magical thinking, association-based and similarities-based notions of causality are not always said to be the practice of magic by a magician. For example, the doctrine of signatures held that similarities between plant parts and body parts indicated their efficacy in treating diseases of those body parts, and was a part of Western medicine during the Middle Ages. This association-based thinking is a vivid example of the general human application of the representativeness heuristic.[26]
Edward Burnett Tylor coined the term "associative thinking",[27] characterizing it as pre-logical,[citation needed] in which the "magician's folly" is in mistaking an imagined connection with a real one. The magician believes that thematically linked items can influence one another by virtue of their similarity.[28] For example, in E. E. Evans-Pritchard's account, members of the Azande tribe[29] believe that rubbing crocodile teeth on banana plants can invoke a fruitful crop. Because crocodile teeth are curved (like bananas) and grow back if they fall out, the Azande observe this similarity and want to impart this capacity of regeneration to their bananas. To them, the rubbing constitutes a means of transference.
In How Natives Think (1925), Lucien Lvy-Bruhl describes a similar notion of mystical, "collective representations". He too sees magical thinking as fundamentally different from a Western style of thought. He asserts that in these representations, "primitive" people's "mental activity is too little differentiated for it to be possible to consider ideas or images of objects by themselves apart from the emotions and passions which evoke those ideas or are evoked by them".[31] Lvy-Bruhl explains that the indigenous people commit the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, in which people observe that x is followed by y, and conclude that x has caused y.[32] He believes that this fallacy is institutionalized in native culture and is committed regularly and repeatedly.
Despite the view that magic is less than rational and entails an inferior concept of causality, in The Savage Mind (1966), Claude Lvi-Strauss suggested that magical procedures are relatively effective in exerting control over the environment. This outlook has generated alternative theories of magical thinking, such as the symbolic and psychological approaches, and softened the contrast between "educated" and "primitive" thinking: "Magical thinking is no less characteristic of our own mundane intellectual activity than it is of Zande curing practices."[33][n 1]
Robin Horton maintains that the difference between the thinking of Western and of non-Western peoples is predominantly "idiomatic". He says that the members of both cultures use the same practical common-sense, and that both science and magic are ways beyond basic logic by which people formulate theories to explain whatever occurs. However, non-Western cultures use the idiom of magic and have community spiritual figures, and therefore non-Westerners turn to magical practices or to a specialist in that idiom. Horton sees the same logic and common-sense in all cultures, but notes that their contrasting ontological idioms lead to cultural practices which seem illogical to observers whose own culture has correspondingly contrasting norms. He explains, "[T]he layman's grounds for accepting the models propounded by the scientist are often no different from the young African villager's ground for accepting the models propounded by one of his elders."[34]
One theory of substantive difference is that of the open versus closed society. Horton describes this as one of the key dissimilarities between traditional thought and Western science. He suggests that the scientific worldview is distinguished from a magical one by the scientific method and by skepticism, requiring the falsifiability of any scientific hypothesis. He notes that for native peoples "there is no developed awareness of alternatives to the established body of theoretical texts."[37] He notes that all further differences between traditional and Western thought can be understood as a result of this factor. He says that because there are no alternatives in societies based on magical thought, a theory does not need to be objectively judged to be valid.
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