The Pitfalls of Magical Thinking

Video games are often being promoted by psychologists as a means of suppressing children’s feelings of inferiority: in the game a child forgets for a while that it is small and weak, and gets the opportunity to magically influence the world. By taking a child out of this magical world and returning it to the world of ordinary reality, where everything is difficult, where it is necessary to

listen to parents and learn, to remember something, to make an effort all the time and often experience failure, you essentially make them lose this acute joy of being – and the child resists.

Magical Thinking in the Modern World

Addiction to magical game reality is only one of the examples of the brave new world we’re living in. In modern industrial cultures, man goes down such rabbit holes all the time, willingly or unwillingly. What spheres of life does magical reality penetrate? What consequences can it bring for the person and society? How do we now fall prey to the magical construct of reality?

Psychological research in recent decades has shown that at the level of the unconscious, educated adults in modern industrial countries continue to believe in the supernatural. In order to test the effect of this law in the minds of modern people, in a recently published study the participants of an experiment were told that the club they would use to solve a sports problem previously belonged to a professional golfer.

It turned out that participants in the experiment who believed in this legend not only drove the ball into the hole significantly more successfully than those who thought the same club was simply a new one, but also perceived the hole as wider and more convenient for hitting. This shows that people’s belief in the magical transmission of power and skill through the tool does exist, and it works by increasing the success rate of those who wield the tool in question.

Most modern adults deny that they believe in magic. However, when it comes to things that are personally important, most show faith in the supernatural abilities of a professional magician to influence these things. Such belief can extend not only to magicians by profession, but also to other people having influence and authority in society: politicians, scientists, doctors, bankers, etc. This opens up opportunities for people of power to use adults’ subconscious belief to manipulate people’s consciousness in order to extract economic, political, and social benefits.

The Magic of Economics

In 2002, the American psychologist Kahneman received the Nobel Prize for the study of “cognitive biases” in economics. One of these biases is the “anchor effect. The effect consists in the fact that when solving economic problems, people rely on information that, although not rationally related to the essence of these problems, becomes a kind of “point of reference”. For example, if people are asked to choose a two-digit number from a set of numbers and

then estimate the value of different goods (a type of wine, a bar of chocolate, or a computer), people who randomly choose a larger two-digit number will value the goods at a higher amount than people who choose a smaller number.

The magic of numbers goes back to Pythagoras, but it continues to work today. Among magic numbers, three is probably the most popular. As a recent study by psychologists at Georgetown and UCLA found, advertising has also fallen under the influence of the number three. If you want the “product” you’re advertising to be favorably received by a potential customer, you have to name three positive qualities of that product. It doesn’t matter if the object of the advertisement is a shampoo, a vacation hotel, or a presidential candidate. But if you name four or more positive qualities instead of three, the magic will disappear and the advertised product will lose its appeal to the consumer.

The Magic of Medicine

According to some reports, up to 35% of physicians use the placebo effect in practice. Besides official medics, the placebo effect is widely used by all kinds of preachers of magic treatment. However, unlike real doctors, magicians are not constrained by the Hippocratic oath, and can use the placebo effect where its application does not yield results, but only provokes unrealistic hopes – for example, in case of cancer, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s diseases.

Another instance of sympathetic magic is homeopathy. Homeopathic medicine is based on the principle of treating like with like. The idea is that a medicine should contain a substance that causes the same or similar symptoms as the disease it treats, but in very diluted concentrations. Homeopaths are sure that such a solution heals better than the medicine approved by official medicine. The mechanism of the effect is that the water is “charged with the energy” of the original substance, plus the energy of the homeopath. Scientific medicine and modern chemistry do not understand the mechanisms of “water charging with energy”, but even if homeopathy does not surpass the placebo effect in efficiency, it still has some effect. It seems that magical thinking of patients helps homeopaths.

The Magic of Politics

The Egyptians believed that the pharaoh was the son of a mage god. The authority of modern spiritual leaders (e.g., the Pope) also comes from a god. Finally, the authority of morality, the advantages of good over evil, is impossible without the approval of good by a magician god, since in ordinary life it is obvious that evil is stronger than good.

It is known that in the popular consciousness the Emperor of Japan Hirohito, who reigned during World War II, was seen as possessing divine power and descended from the gods. This was largely responsible for the Japanese army’s fanatical resistance in the war with the United States. In the Battle of Okinawa (April 1945), the Japanese kamikaze pilots had inflicted so much damage to the American fleet that it influenced the decision to use the nuclear bomb.