Is Your Thinking Magical?

Source: Nikolay Ivanov/Pexels

Do you ever fear that just by thinking of possible misfortune, you might make it happen? Do you otherwise believe, or half-believe, perhaps, that following a certain ritual will help prevent that horrible thing from happening? Do you attach special magical properties to certain things, such as a lucky charm, a crystal, or even a vitamin tablet?

Superstition as a Natural Adaptation

My very sensible great-aunt used to believe that certain numbers were more likely to win the Spanish national lottery simply because they sounded "nice" (this lottery included numbers between 00000 and 99999, but some were much nicer than others, according to my great-aunt). A friend of mine will only watch England play football (soccer) on TV if he is wearing his lucky underpants, whose magical properties, unfortunately, didn't help his national team win their encounter against France in the World Cup.

Some believe that magical thinking may be an evolutionary adaptation, a trait that favors survival. The reasoning goes as follows: It is obviously crucial for our survival to make accurate cognitive assessments and find patterns and causal associations that may have an important impact on us. It has been argued that it is, in fact, more advantageous, in evolutionary terms, to believe in lots of erroneous associations (such as magical underpants favoring the chances of England winning) than to miss the occasional true important one that could kill us or bring us a great fortune. As a result of this, we over-recognize causal associations (such as "nice-sounding" lottery numbers being more likely to win the prize) in the same way we over-recognize rabbits and elephants in cloud patterns.

From Normal to Pathological

Once again, I think it is useful to approach this from a dimensional perspective. Health professionals tend to think in categorical terms, that is, either disease is present or it is not. This model generally works well because it determines whether a person should have treatment or not, which is obviously a very important consideration. But many psychological issues are best approached from a dimensional (not categorical) point of view, and magical thinking is, in my view, one of them.

A certain amount of magical thinking, be it superstition or a benign and self-contained peculiar belief or engaging in magical rituals that don't make you suffer or disrupt your life, is perfectly normal and probably part of our human fabric, particularly in childhood. As we saw above, superstitions may even carry an evolutionary advantage. However, if the rituals and magical beliefs become at any point intrusive and problematic, then they may be a symptom of an obsessive neurosis, or even a psychosis, that will require professional attention.

It is important to bear in mind, in any case, that traditions and cultural beliefs tend to contain generous amounts of magical thinking and that a world bereft of magic would be a stark and desolate place. A bit of magic dust makes our existence more interesting.