Several
streams of research in psychology, neuroscience and philosophy are
converging on an uncomfortable truth: Humans are more susceptible to
magical thinking than they’d like to admit.
How
many words does it take to know you’re talking to an adult? In “Peter
Pan,” J.M. Barrie needed just five: “Do you believe in fairies?”
Such belief requires magical thinking.
Children suspend disbelief. They trust that events happen with no
physical explanation, and they equate an image of something with its
existence. Magical thinking was Peter Pan’s key to eternal youth.
The ghouls and goblins that will haunt
All Hallows’ Eve on Friday also require people to take a leap of faith.
Zombies wreak terror because children believe that the once-dead can
reappear.
At haunted houses, children dip their
hands in buckets of cold noodles and spaghetti sauce. Even if you tell
them what they touched, they know they felt guts. And children surmise
that with the right Halloween makeup, costume and demeanor, they can
frighten even the most skeptical adult.
We do grow up. We get jobs. We have children of our own. Along the way, we lose our tendencies toward magical thinking.
Or at least we think we do. Several
streams of research in psychology, neuroscience and philosophy are
converging on an uncomfortable truth: We’re more susceptible to magical
thinking than we’d like to admit.
Consider the quandary facing college
students in a clever demonstration of magical thinking. An experimenter
hands you several darts and instructs you to throw them at different
pictures. Some depict likable objects (for example, a baby), others are
neutral (for example, a face-shaped circle). Would your performance
differ if you lobbed darts at a baby?
It would. Performance plummeted when
people threw the darts at the baby. Laura A. King, the psychologist at
the University of Missouri who led this investigation, notes that
research participants have a “baseless concern that a picture of an
object shares an essential relationship with the object itself.”
Paul Rozin, a psychology professor at
the University of Pennsylvania, argues that these studies demonstrate
the magical law of similarity. Our minds subconsciously associate an
image with an object.
When something happens to the image, we
experience a gut-level intuition that the object has changed as well.
Put yourself in the place of those poor college students. What would it
feel like to take aim at the baby, seeking to impale it through its
bright blue eye? We can skewer a picture of a baby face. We can stab a
voodoo doll. Even as our conscious minds know we caused no harm, our
primitive reaction thinks we tempted fate.
How can well-educated people — those who ought to know better — struggle to throw a dart at a piece of paper?
Some philosophers argue that magical
thinking is, in some ways, adaptive. Tamar Gendler, a philosopher at
Yale University, has coined the term “aliefs” to refer to innate and
habitual reactions that may be at odds with our conscious beliefs — as
when pictures of vipers, snarling dogs or crashing airplanes make our
hearts race.
Aliefs motivate us to take or withhold
action. You might enjoy sweets, but would you eat a chocolate bar shaped
like feces? Rozin and his colleagues showed that college students would
not, though they knew it would not harm them.
Our conscious beliefs tell us to shape
up, use our wits and act rationally. But our subconscious aliefs set off
deeply ingrained reactions that protect us from disease. The alief
often wins.
We may have evolved to be this way — and
that is not always a bad thing. We enter the world with innate
knowledge that helped our evolutionary ancestors survive and reproduce.
Babies know mother from stranger, scalding heat from soothing warmth.
When we grow up, our minds cling to that knowledge and, without our awareness, use it to try to make sense of the world.
Can magical beliefs offer a window into
the aggressive mind? My colleagues and I examined this idea in recent
research published in the journal Aggressive Behaviour.
In one illustrative study, 529 married
Americans were shown a picture of a doll and were told that it
represented their spouse. They could insert as many pins into the doll
as they wished, from zero to 51.
Participants also reported how often
they had perpetrated intimate partner violence, which included
psychological aggression and physical assault. Voodoo dolls can measure
whether your romantic partner is “hangry” — that dangerous combination
of hunger and anger. If we let our blood sugar drop, it becomes harder
to put the brakes on our aggressive urges.
In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we showed that on days when their blood sugar dropped, married people stabbed the voodoo doll with more pins.
Do people take the voodoo doll
seriously? If they don’t, their responses should not relate to actual
violent behavior. But they do. The more pins people used to stab the
voodoo doll, the more psychological and physical aggression they
perpetrated.
Stabbing a voodoo doll can also satisfy
the desire for vengeance, another study found. When German students
imagined an upsetting situation, they began to see the world through
blood-colored glasses, increasing their tendency to ruminate on
aggression-related thoughts. Stabbing a voodoo doll that represented the
provocateur returned their glasses to their normal hue.
By quenching their aggressive appetite,
magical beliefs enabled provoked students to satisfy their aggressive
goal without harming anyone.
Yes, children believe in magic because
they don’t know any better. Peter Pan never grew up because he embraced
magical beliefs. But such beliefs make for more than happy Halloweeners
and children’s books. They give a glimpse into how the mind makes sense
of the world.
We can’t overcome magical thinking. It
is part of our evolved psychology. Our minds may fool us into thinking
we are immune to magical thoughts. But we are only fooling ourselves.
That’s the neatest trick of all.
