MAGICAL THINKING

What is magical thinking?

Magical thinking is the belief that our thoughts or desires alone can cause something to happen or that an event such as a birthdate or the position of some planets can cause you to meet a tall, dark, handsome stranger despite there being no physical causal link between them. Allied to this is the human desire for explanations for phenomena (Keil, 2006; Lombrozo & Vasilyeva, 2017). We can get anxious if we don't have them. In the past, people stuck on a train that stops in the middle of nowhere for no obvious reason got agitated because they didn't know what was happening. When drivers started to tell passengers why the train had stopped, there were fewer complaints. In some cases, it doesn’t matter what the explanation is as long as there is one. If there’s thunder and you don’t know what causes it, then postulating an angry god provides an explanation, and, in a particular culture, a believable one. The ignorance is removed. We don’t, therefore, need to expend the effort needed to find out what's really going on when lightning strikes. The culturally accepted, intuitive response suffices.

Superstition, beliefs in the supernatural and religious beliefs are a combination of trying to find an explanation for what would otherwise be inexplicable, an attempt to predict the world, and a mechanism of social cohesion. Some forms of superstitious or magical thinking take the form of what we call 'luck'. A belief in luck is often a combination of associative learning and confirmation bias. If you have a lucky rabbit's foot and you just escape a nasty road accident, then it’s just as well you have a lucky rabbit’s foot since it caused the car to miss you. It’s hard to imagine what the world would be like if lucky objects really were lucky. Think how many hundreds of thousands of lottery millionaires there would be now, how few accidents there would be, how many hundreds of thousands of children do better in exams than expected, and so on. These objects are deemed lucky because the owners have noticed the good luck they bring and ignored all the times when they have brought no such luck. Our knowledge of the world includes the inductive associations we make between one thing (X) and another (Y) such that X seems to cause, or be reliably followed by, Y. Hence, the intuitive, ill-thought-through view that the rabbit's paw must exert a power over the world. It’s often a very useful way to make sense of the world, so there is method in your madness. It's just not a very good method.

Associative thinking can be immediate such as when an event (X) is immediately associated with another event (Y). If you flick a switch and a light comes on, you know that the flicking the switch caused the light to come on. If, when you flick the switch, there is a simultaneous bang in the street, it can temporarily be difficult to shake off the belief that switching the light on had caused the bang. Such dubious cause and effect associations can give rise to superstitious thinking particularly in stressful, competitive, or dangerous situations. In the theatre, there are a number of general superstitions. Whistling backstage is assumed to bring bad luck, as is saying ‘good luck". ‘Break a leg" is usually said instead. Don't refer to ‘Macbeth’ in a theatre but rather: ‘the Scottish play’. Tennis stars provide a good example of idiosyncratic superstitions. When Serena Williams was on a winning streak, she reportedly did not change her socks as if the socks were the cause of the winning streak. Roger Federer believed that having eight things (racquets and bottles of water) or doing something such as wiping his face eight times contributed to his success. Early in Andy Murray’s career, he wore a 'lucky' grey Fred Perry shirt and it was noted that he hadn't stopped winning since he started to wear it, defeating Rafael Nadal and reaching the final of the US Open at the age of 21. The tennis stars seem to have identified a pattern in their behaviour and sought to maintain it. Beck and Forstmeier (2007) argue that, since detecting patterns is an evolved characteristic, superstition is a by-product.

While such personal superstitions may seem irrational to the outside observer, it would be useful to know if they perform any useful function. A study by Damisch, Stoberock, and Mussweiler (2010) suggests that such superstitions can lead to performance improvements in a wide range of areas such as golf, motor dexterity, memory, and anagrams. They conclude that such performance improvements are due to a feeling of increased self-efficacy and confidence. Magical thinking, including superstitions and personal idiosyncratic rituals, seems to be related to a desire for this kind of predictability (Brashier, Umanath, Cabeza, & Marsh, 2017; Keinan, 1994. 2002). They both derive from a desire to impose a reassuring pattern on the world that, in turn, leads to rituals that seem to be useful at reducing stress. That said, there is some evidence that magical explanations for events tend to fade away with age (Brashier et al., 2017), probably due to a greater experience of the world. Sometimes, though, a superstition can co-exist alongside a rational explanation of events: ‘God puts you in the path of an HIV-positive lover, but biology causes you to contract the virus from his semen" (Susan Gelman, quoted in Hutson, 2008).