The psychology behind magical thinking and superstitious behavior

Vew few are really aware of these cognitive mechanisms that surround the mind. Most of us are ignorant when it comes to their own psyche. And this is a problem. Not knowning your own instincts and the evolutionary mechanisms that shaped the mind. We operate on this mode most hours of the day and it is an inseparable component of human nature. Even people who are highly intelligent and 'rational' are vitctims of this mechanism, people who are trying to abandon primitive and conventional ideas such as religion, the popular idea of romance or who want to be skeptic about phenomena such as UFOs, clairvoyance, occultism, conspirancy theories, ESP, etc. They still recruit this mechanism and they might believe in the power of voting, politics, winning the lottery, they might believe in 'love' or spirituality or something which requires some (healthy) amount of wishful and magical thinking.

Smart people are not immune to this since apparently magical thinking is what led our ancestors to survive in the jungle. Some 'delusions' are what keep humanity going and without them we wouldn't survive. You can pretty much easily see how people are not only only lying to others but they also delude themselves one way or another. Nature and human relationships are pretty much based on deception and lying.

But what exactly is magical thinking? Magical thinking is usally attributed more to schizophrenic patients, people with delusional disorders, paranoia and patients with psychotic traits. Their irrationality can be easily spotted. For instance, someone might believe that his personal actions are directly linked to an event such as 'if I write an e-mail, NASA or the secret services might see it and I might be persecuted' or ' I am not using a TV sattelite because this might interfere with Alien activity'. Its not really hard to grasp this concept especially when it comes to paranoid schizophrenia and severe delusional disorders. But now think about this when it happens to relatively healthy people. A milder form of this paranoia takes place among us every day. And this is an argument I usually bring fourth when someone proclaims himself as a secular rational being who relies on logic and reason; If he is immune to these powerful mechanisms of the human brain to produce 'irrational' behavior just because he has read Richard Dawkins and managed to free himself from the chains of the irrational practices of religion.

'If I play the lottery every day I might one day become a millionaire' or 'if I have two wins in a row, this might be a sign of luck, and a sign that I should play for a third time'. ' If I don't go to the church every Sunday or during the Great week or during a memorial of a beloved one, something bad will happen'. 'Do not curse so much, do not mention the devil cause something bad will happen'. 'Pray under that particular tree and it will rain'. Think about black cats that we were taught never to look them in the eyes. Think about each time we cross our selves every time we pass near a church or crossing fingers wishing luck. I can even apply this to certain rituals that we do every day just not to feel akward and unease with our selves in a social envrionment such as dressing for the Halloween, eating turkey for Thanksgiving, going for holidays during the last couple weeks of August, or celebrating the Green Monay outdoors, even wishing people for their birthdays, and many unwritten laws that we abide to every day. In other words, we need rituals.

I know what you are thinking. And it is correct. Its mostly a collective and a cultural/social form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). We need this cognitive mechanism to be able to understand our environment and even control it. It was born out of the need to control the environment. Specific rituals that we believe that they produce particular results and without them something will go wrong. We need this to alleviate our existential anxieties. We need these rituals because we can't handle chaos, uncertaintly and unpredictablity. We need to rely on rituals which produce some form of order and stability. Its not really hard to realize how back this goes. Just think about every culture which existed on this planet. Think about all the supersitions that we have around us. Or even better try to think about modern superstitions that even intelligent people use in order to make sense of the environment. Little things that we do every day. I can even think of an example right now which is voting and politics. Its a form of ritual and magical thinking. In some way we believe that our vote will make a difference to how the world functions. We tend to think that our vote will change the current state of affairs and we are pretty damn serious about it.

And this is actually what magical thinking is about if we want to provide a definition. Its the irrational thought that our behavior has somehow an impact on the environment around us. It underlies our need to feel important. Its also the notion that our behaviors and thoughts have a causal relationship to something else. That our thoughts and behaviors are directly linked to a certain outcome, more like a post-hoc fallacy or patternicity. The need to seek and find patterns when they are not there. The action of making-up patterns when there is nothing there. Its seeking temporal continuity about two events that seem similar or associating two facts which seem that the one follows the other or the first one is caused by the latter. Its our ability for teleological reasoning and cause-and-effect relationships. Its an inability to understand coincidences. You pray for money and then a couple of days after you find $50 dollars in one of your trousers or you pray for your dying relative and suddently there is a marked improvement after a couple of weeks.

Magical thinking is actually a mechanism employed and observed mostly in young children where from a very young age they reduce their anxiety by building magical worlds and they have imaginary friends. Apparently, this mechanism does not die entirely afterwards but it is manifested in a more 'rational' and 'grown' form by adults. Think about the 'placebo' effect. It is also a form of magical thinking, evident in homeopathy and alternative medicine. We attribute the effects we see on our health on drugs or herbal remedies when in reality there is nothing there or at least something measureable and statistically significant. Our brains obviously do not understand correlations, associations, coincidences, cannot handle uncertainty and cannot handle chaos in the environment. They were evolved to seek causality. Rarely one ever admits that she does not know. We immediately try to come-up with an explanation about everything. What happens when we see cropcircles or when we see a plane landing on a building?. We employ magic and we seek for deep meaningful justifications, a darker version of the story, think about when you hear about a celebrity's death or a terrorist attack one similar to 9/11. We rarely use the Ocam's razor. We seek darker versions of a story, a more complex narrative but usually of more loose assocations. We seek something far more complex because we cannot grasp at an existential level that life is that random and futile.

Magical thinking is a kind of narcissism which is embedded in the human mind from birth. We think that the world revolves around us. We think that we are too damn special. That our words affect the world, that we cause things, that we make things happen. It probably stems from the egocentric stage of childhood development, where the child thinks that if mommy and daddy are fighting or are getting a divorce is probably because of its actions. I can even take this mechanism and apply it to environmentalists, social justice warriors, vegans and religious people. This form of narcissism which allows them to believe that their actions are destroying the environment, the food-chain or that the Universe fancies them, observes them and cares about their insignifant actions. 'I found a parking spot, see? God is taking care of me', 'The universe is an expression of me, and I am expressing the universe and I can directly affect the energies of the universe through positive thinking and meditation'. Don't get me wrong, our actions DO affect the environment one way or another and even my vote or my petition might mean something but not to that great extent that we usually think it matters.

How about astrology; the old idea that the planets play a role in our lives. An example of patternicity can be found here. Vague statements which can be attributed to anybody about her personality. Think about the 'faces' we tend to see on Mars or Jesus appearning on your toast. Its actually 'pareidolia' in action: Our brains are evolved to extrapolate evidence based on insufficient data and is able to take a meaningless pattern, random noise, and anthroporphize it, thus, it make a cloud smiling or resembling a familar object in one's culture. Its not that hard to see why this mehanism is useful. Seeing faces and different objects every time there is a resemblance was crucial to one's survival in our ancestors' environments.

Our minds are terrible interpretators of the world since it relies on mental shortcuts and heuristics and other cognitive fallacies. They are fast, automatic, effortless and its the way to go when one needs to survive in dangerous and unpredictable environments. Imagine that you are in a jungle or in the battlefield. If you just sit for a monent and try to employ critical thinking and recruit deliberate reasoning or thinking about your thoughts and challenging them or trying to modify them you are not going to last for long. If you hear a bear coming or a tiger roaring your first reaction will be: 'If it sounds like a bear it is probably one, if it looks like a lion its probably one'. No need to double-check. You do not have time to examine if the roar comes from a bear, a jaguar or a cheetah or how old the bear might be, if it is a young innocent cute bear or if it is a moderately dangerous bear or not dangerous at all. You simply just run. The very ancient mechanism of magical thinking goes back to our very early evolution where we became able to fantasize about our significant others when they are not there. A young child as it grows it begins to realize that when her mother is not there, she does not simply vanishes or disappears. She might predict and estimate where her mother is and what she might be doing right now. An adult speaks with her brother on the phone or via email or via social media and she can visualize him and have a representation of him in her mind and that he probably has lunch at this time of the day. And this is where the mechanism of 'magical thinking' is probably rooted.

Since our mind is full of glitches its no wonder we are so easily susceptible to frauds, pranksters, advertisers, magicians, crooks and charlatans. They simply play with all these glitches and they manage to deceive our minds. We still hold, even with our civilization progressing, many delusions which keep us going, such as marriage and the eternal bond between two people or that our friends will never abandon us or that our friend cares as much as we do for them or that by dropping-out from high school I can become like Bill Gates and we constantly alter reality to meet our delusional thinking.