Origins of magical thinking

There are aspects of children's thinking that survive to affect that of adults. We saw in Chapter 2 that babies and young children have an animistic view of the world and are predisposed to assume some form of agency in order to make things happen, from cars moving to the wind blowing. There are many events and phenomena that we cannot, or couldn't in the past, necessarily explain. As a result, we would invent causal explanations that involve some unseen agency such as water spirits, wind gods, dryads, and so on. The belief in invisible external agencies can be bolstered by theory of mind. While this evolved to help us interact in social groups, it can be extended to those external agencies watching over you (gods, saints, spirits).

In trying to make sense of their experience, young children may categorize things based on their superficial features. For example, Gentner and Toupin (1986) presented children with stories that they had to act out by playing characters in the stories. At the end of the stories, in some cases, there was a sentence providing a conclusion in the form of a moral. An example of an original story involved a chipmunk who helped a moose to escape from a frog. The children had to act out a version involving different characters. In one, the characters were obviously semantically related (the chipmunk became a squirrel, the moose became an elk, and the frog became a toad). This was the 'high transparency’ condition where the features of the story were clearly related and easily mapped. There was also a 'low transparency’ condition where the roles were partly reversed: the elk now played the role of the chipmunk, the toad played the role of the moose, and the squirrel played the frog. A third ‘medium transparency’ condition had characters that were not semantically related to the originals. Younger children imitated the sequence of actions taken by semantically similar characters in the earlier story but in the medium and low conditions, they tended to produce a ‘non-systematic’ conclusion. Only when the children understood the underlying systematic rationale for the story were they able to adapt the characters’ roles to fit the story’s structure.

Similarities in surface features can also lead adults to ignore or be unaware of the underlying structure of a situation. Fraser’s (1922/2002) book 'The Golden Bough" provides many examples of superficial similarity used in ritual and magic. For example, to persuade the sky to rain, a shaman may sprinkle water on the parched ground to give the sky a clue as to what is needed. He referred to this kind of thinking as homeopathic magic. For many centuries, educated people used superficial similarity as a basis for analogizing to explain phenomena in the world around them. Colour, for example, was an important feature that allowed associations to be made between an object and something else of the same colour. Different coloured metals were associated with the colours of heavenly bodies, gold and yellow for the sun, silver and white for the moon, iron and red for Mars, copper and green for Venus, and so on. Basing reasoning on superficial features is a kind of magical thinking as it ignores a causal structure (Gentner & Colhoun. 2010; Gentner & Jee, 2010; Gentner & Jeziorski, 1989, 1993). Gentner and Jeziorski discuss the move from alchemy to chemistry and pointed out that the alchemists had a great enthusiasm for analogies. Many of them were derived from ancient Egyptian and Greek theories of the elements (fire, water, earth, and air) that, in turn, combined two each of the qualities: hot, cold, wet, and dry. For example, mercury was regarded as fiery, active, and male; sulphur was watery, passive, and female. Combining them produced a ‘marriage'. Gentner and Jeziorski quote Umberto Eco (1990) on Renaissance hermetism (a spiritual, philosophical, and magical tradition whose name is taken from the Graeco-Egyptian God Hermès Trismegistos): ‘The basic principle is not only that the similar can be known through the similar but also that from similarity to similarity everything can be connected with everything else' (Gentner and Jeziorski, 1993, p. 468).

Explanations and correspondences based on superficial features ignore the underlying causal structure required to explain natural phenomena. If red plants can be used to treat problems of the blood, by what mechanism does the colour manage that? Despite the fact that chemistry and physics took over from alchemy a long time ago, a reliance on homeopathic magic continues. Homeopathic medicine is based on the idea that ‘like cures like’ despite there being no reason why it should any more than assuming yellow plants have a causal relationship with jaundice or that sprinkling water on the ground will make it rain.