Search Results

In Chapter 2 (“Children and Magic”), various issues of magical beliefs in children are discussed. It starts with a brief analysis of Piaget's famous description of magical reasoning in children. It then presents the data of recent experiments with preschool children that demonstrate children's beliefs in magic. Essentially, these experiments show that by the age of 4 years, in their verbal judgments, most preschoolers are skeptical toward the possibility of “mind-over-matter” magic, yet in their actions, they behave as if they really believe in magic. Various alternative interpretations of children's “magical” behaviors are analyzed, and follow-up experiments are presented that allow one to overrule the argument that preschool children do not yet have the idea of “true magic” and confuse magical effects with magic tricks.

Chapter 1 (“Magical Reality”) covers conceptual issues. Despite the popular view that the concept of “real magic” is a contradiction in terms, the point is made that not only can the concept of “true magic” be given a strict definition but also that truly magical events do indeed happen, at least in the domains of children's play, children's and adult's fantasy, dreams, and art. The conceptual difference between magic and science is discussed. It is argued that, despite the fact that modern science achieved remarkable results in producing effects that in the previous centuries would be viewed as magical (transmitting visual images and sounds remotely, flying in the air and space), there is still a fundamental difference between these effects and true magic. Various instances of magical events (such as “coming to life magic,” “nonpermanence magic,” and “sympathetic magic”) are analyzed. The generic concepts of magic—the “mind-over-matter” and “mind-over-mind”—are defined. The relationship between concepts of magic and religion is discussed. The concepts of institutionalized and noninstitutionalized magical beliefs are introduced. The state of the problem is discussed, and the aim of this book is defined. The chapter finishes with hypotheses and predictions.

Chapter 12 (“Magical Thinking and Beliefs Across the Lifespan: A Summary”) gives an overview the data reviewed in the book and presents a new theory about the development of magical thinking and behavior across the lifespan. Initially, belief in magic was viewed as a phenomenon specific to childhood. Increasingly, however, it has been argued that magical beliefs, while diminishing in older children's and adults' verbal judgments, can persist in their behavioral responses. In light of research discussed in this book, it can be argued that the development of magical beliefs conforms to a more complex model. Chased by science and religion, children's early magical beliefs descend into the subconscious. Most adults consistently deny such beliefs. They also develop a fear of magical intervention that results in the psychological defense mechanisms. In spite of this, under certain circumstances, magical beliefs are consciously accepted. One form of admitting magical beliefs into one's consciousness while not contradicting the dominant scientific paradigm at the same time is curiosity and exploration. Another form of “legal existence” of magical beliefs is transformation and disguise: by throwing off their explicit link with magic, certain mechanisms of magical thinking survive today under pseudonyms such as fear of contagion, feelings of disgust, and, in communicative magic, obedience, conformity, and suggestibility.

In Chapter 3 (“Verbal Magical Beliefs and Children's Everyday Experience”), the problem of entrenchment of magical beliefs in children of various ages is examined. The development of magical beliefs in children is put in the context of a more general model of people's reaction to anomalous events, both in the sciences (Kuhn, Lacatos) and in school education (Chinn & Brewer). This allowed one to consider the transition from magical to scientific thinking in children as an instance of a “revolution” in children's causal thinking about the world. Experiments are presented that examine when and how this fundamental transition from magical to scientific thinking occurs, and whether this transition is a complete replacement of one kind of causal orientation with the alternative kind or is domain specific and covers only knowledge about the physical world, whereas in other areas (such as fantasy, play, or human relations) magic thinking persists to older ages. In contrast to most previous studies, in these experiments, special care was taken to ensure that children understood the difference between “true magic” and “fake magic” (i.e., magic tricks).

Chapter 10 (“Magical Beliefs and Psychological Defense”) considers defense strategies that people use to protect themselves against magical suggestion. Indeed, being totally vulnerable to suggestion would mean living in an unsafe world that lacks order and predictability. Experiments are presented and discussed that show some of these strategies. For example, cognitive defense against magical suggestion is demonstrated in the experiment when participants involuntarily distort the order of events that happened in their full view just a few seconds before, with the aim to discard a magical (impossible) event and reinterpret it as an ordinary (possible) event. A more effective emotional defense was observed when participants (graduate and undergraduate students) were asked to select a practical task that they would like to improve on (such as writing essays or speaking foreign languages) and then it was magically suggested that they would improve on it. In 2 weeks' time, in the magical suggestion condition, a significantly larger number of participants reported having no improvement than in the control condition, in which no suggestion had been made.

Chapter 9 (“Magic and Human Communication”) concentrates on theoretical and experimental research on “mind-over-mind” magic. Referring to anthropological data, it argues that in the early historic stages, magical influence on people (for the purpose of healing or bringing harm) was based on suggestion and autosuggestion. With the onset of scientific ideology, overt magical rituals were discarded, yet suggestion remains the most effective mechanism of manipulation in politics, commerce, and psychotherapy. This brings one to the assumption that ordinary suggestion today may be based on the same psychological mechanism, as was magical suggestion in the times before science. Experiments are presented that show that this common mechanism—participation—does indeed exist. This fact has important implications for understanding the psychological-historical continuity of the control over minds. If magical and ordinary types of suggestion are based on the same psychological mechanism—participation—then suggestive persuasion techniques used in political rhetoric and commercial advertising today may be viewed as historically evolving from magical practices. Viewed in this light, suggestion is literally the magic of today.

Chapter 5 (“Beyond Childhood”) presents anthropological and psychological research on magical thinking in adults. It argues not only that magical thinking does not disappear in adults, but also that it, in fact, develops and diversifies. On one hand, magical thinking thrives in the domain of subconsciously based mechanisms, such as disgust or fear of contagion (Paul Rozin, Carol Nemeroff). The effects of thought–action fusion (TAF) and obsessive-compulsive thinking are also based on sympathetic magic. In clinical research, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that schizophrenic patients tend to engage in magically based compulsive thinking to a considerably larger extent than both the general population and nonschizophrenic psychiatric patients. Altogether, these studies present magical thinking as scattered on a scale from helpful protective reactions (for example, disgust or fear of contagion) to the reactions of a troubled mind, as in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The chapter then presents experiments demonstrating that, under certain circumstances, modern educated adults could indeed display magical beliefs, and not only at the level of subconscious reactions, but also at the level of full consciousness and critical capacity.

In Chapter 8 (“Magical Thinking and Imagination”), the issue of how magical thinking works in the domain of nonphysical (imagined) reality is analyzed. The chapter begins with an overview of studies on children's understanding the difference between physical and mental objects, and then continues with experiments on children's and adults' preparedness to accept that real or imagined objects could be changed by a magic spell. The most interesting result of these experiments was that, unlike children, adults reported that magical manipulations had little effect on both real and their imagined physical objects, but had a strong effect on their imagined fantastical objects. Further experiments showed that participants' personally significant imagined (PERSIM) objects, such as their images of their future lives, were particularly strongly affected by the experimenter's magical manipulations. This result fits within the domain of “mind-over-mind” type of magic.

This chapter examines the impact of the cosmological shift in early modern Europe on civility. This shift from a magical and religion-dominated cosmology to a mechanistic and secular one occurred roughly between 1550 and 1850. The most ambitious attempt to explain this shift is given in the two major works by Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic and Man and the Natural World. These books explain that reasons behind the decline in magical beliefs and the emergence of science.

This chapter examines the state of affairs in the mid-eighteenth century. It also explores the extent to which a medical approach to magic and related phenomena became fashionable among intellectuals as part of the Enlightenment. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of doctors like Sir Hans Sloane and Richard Mead and the nature of their diagnosis of those with magical beliefs. Consideration is also given to the hitherto neglected influence of such ideas on liberal churchmen in their discussions of miracles and related topics. All this provides a means of exploring how scepticism on such subjects fits into our understanding of the Enlightenment as a whole.

This chapter shows that the history of black magic in modern times is a cosmopolitan drama. Human movement rapidly accelerated from the nineteenth century. People, goods, technologies, and ideas began crossing the earth at a dizzying rate. Travellers took their magical beliefs abroad and encountered new mysticisms when they got there. Empires regulated their colonial subjects in all sorts of ways, including how they dealt with witches. Witchcraft became more international, though at the same time it remained fundamentally rooted in local circumstances. This means that, to understand modern witchcraft, one must combine a global orientation with a local focus. And an excellent place for that local focus is a large island, lying on the eastern edge of the North Atlantic Ocean: Britain.