Surviving in the World of the Machines: the Belief
in Magic in the Age of Science
Eugene Subbotsky Psychology
Department, Lancaster University, UK
e.subbotsky@lancaster.ac.uk
Problem
• Since the time of Galileo (1564 – 1642),
Western civilization has been increasingly
falling under the spell of science.
• Two monotheistic religions dominant in the
Western world – Judaism and Christianity –
that have been fighting with magic for
millennia, have von in science a major ally.
• So, why are magical beliefs still there?
Hypothesis
• Perhaps, they survive in same way that small
mammals survived in the age of dinosaurs: by
hiding underground, in the depth of subconscious
• Hypothesis under test: Initially, magical beliefs
(MBs) appear in children as a legitimate,
conscious form of beliefs that coexist with the
belief in physical causality; later, under the
pressure from science and religion, MBs go into
the domain of the subconscious.
Effect 1
• (1) Young and preschool children should endorse
MBs to the same extent that they endorse the
belief in physical causality, both in their verbal
explanations of unusual effects and in their
behavioral reactions;
• Justification: children’s MBs have not yet
experienced the pressure of scientific and
religious education, the two forces that confront
MBs and exile them into the subconscious.
Effect 2
• (2) Being a significant part of preschool and elementary
school children’s everyday experience, early magical
thinking positively affects children’s performance on
cognitive tasks;
• Justification: Children’s early magical thinking and
magical beliefs receive support from children’s social
environment, in the form of maintaining children’s belief
in folk magical characters (Santa, Tooth Fairy), the
industry of toys and entertainment, books and movies for
children. This systematic (and expensive) support can only
be justified if children’s caretakers (parents, teachers,
psychologists) intuitively realize that magical thinking
entails benefits for children’s cognitive development.
Effect 3
• At a certain period of school age, magical
explanations disappear from children’s verbal
accounts about causes of physical effects, yet
they can be easily reactivated if unexplained
causal effects that assert magic are shown to
them.
• Justification: in the beginning of scientific and
religious education, banishing MBs into the
subconscious is not yet complete, and these
beliefs fluctuate between the domains of
conscious and subconscious.
Effect 4
• (3) When asked to explain unusual causal
effects that assert magic, adults will deny
magical explanations of such effects, even if
these effects are repeatedly shown to them;
• Justification: in their explicit judgments, most
adults want to be in accord with science and
religion.
Effect 5
• When confronted with magical intervention in their
lives, either in the form of observing magical
phenomena or in the form of a sorcerer trying to exert
influence with the help of magic, adults will resist such
intervention: they will either reinterpret magical
phenomena as ordinary phenomena (cognitive
defense) or deny that magical influence had any effect
on their lives (emotional defense).
• Justification: modern science despises magic as false
science, and modern religion associates MBs with bad
forces (the devil, evil spirits, the occult). This creates in
adults the fear of magic and triggers psychological
defenses against magical intervention.
Effect 6
• When psychological defense against magical
influence is relaxed (for example, when denying
the possibility of magic involves a high cost or
when magic affects fantastic and not real
objects), rational adults will retreat to magical
behavior;
• Justification: in adults beliefs in magic do not
disappear but are subconscious. As follows from
psychoanalysis, when defenses are overcome,
subconscious thoughts and beliefs ascend to the
surface of consciousness.
Effect 7
• In contrast to Western educated adults,
uneducated non-Western participants will
endorse magical beliefs both in their verbal
explanations and non-verbal behavior.
• Justification: in non-Western cultures NIMB
are not suppressed by science and religion
and remain in the domain of consciousness
Effect 1: Young children believe in magic
•
•
Moscow of the 1980th. Children aged
4, 5 and 6 years were asked if toy
figures of animals can turn into real
live ones. Only a few four-year-olds
said yes. Yet, when the children saw
that a small plastic lion started
moving by itself on the table
(through the use of magnets), only a
few of the children behaved in a
rational manner (looked for the
mechanism, searched for the wires).
The rest of the children either ran
away fearing that the lion was
coming to life, or applied a magic
wand they had been given in order to
stop the lion moving (Subbotsky,
1985)
Similar effects have later been
reported in Oxford (Harris et al.,
1991) and some American labs.
Effect 2. Children’s magical thinking helps them to be
creative at problem solving
•
•
•
•
•
•
Children aged 4, 6 and 8 years were
divided into experimental and control
conditions.
In both conditions children were shown
fragments from the Harry Potter movie.
In the experimental condition, the movie
was full of magical effects.
In the control condition, the movie
showed the same characters, but no
magical effects.
The children were then tested on identical
sets of creativity tests (TCAM and drawing
of non-existing objects)
Results indicated that children in the
experimental conditions scored
significantly higher than controls on the
majority of subsequent creativity tests
(Subbotsky, Hysted & Jones, 2008)
Effect 3. At school age, magical explanations disappear from
children’s verbal accounts, yet they can be easily reactivated
•
•
•
•
Children aged 5-, 6- and 9 years, who
could understand the difference
between proper magical events and
tricks were asked to tell whether they
believed that true magic exists in the
real world.
Those who and claimed that they did
not believe in magic, were presented
with a causal effect that looked like
an instance of real magic (Subbotsky,
2003)
A brand new postage stamp became
burned in an empty box after the
experimenter cast a magic spell on
the box ordering the stamp to be
burned.
The children were then asked if they
now believed that true magic was
real
Effect 4. Adults deny magic even when repeatedly
confronted with events they cannot rationally explain
•
University undergraduates were subjected to
3 trials in which a postage stamp appeared or
disappeared in an apparently empty box
after the experimenter cast a magic spell on
the box, and one trial when the box stayed
empty after the magic spell was not cast
(Subbotsky, 2004).
•
Altogether, each participant witnessed 4
subsequent events in which a change (or no
change) in the empty box was observed as a
possible result of casting (or not casting) the
magic spell.
Participants consistently denied magical
explanations even though they were unable
to rationally explain these events.
•
Effect 5.1. When confronted with magical effects, adults will reinterpret
magical effects as ordinary effects (cognitive defense)
•
•
•
Undergraduate and postgraduate students
were shown a magical effect – an object that
participants had put in an empty box
disappeared without a trace (Subbotsky,
1996).
Shortly before this, participants were asked
to do a distracter task – to bring the
experimenter a toy car from the other corner
of the room.
The aim of the experiment was to find out if
participants would remember the order of
the events incorrectly, by placing the
distracter event in between the hiding the
object in the box and then finding that the
box is empty. By changing the order of the
events in their memory, participants would
be able to ignore the magical effect and
reinterpret it as an ordinary effect. For
example, while the participant looked away
in order to bring the toy, the experimenter
may have removed the object out of the box.
Effect 5.1 Interestingly, in elementary school children
cognitive defence against magic is absent
•
•
•
Disappearance and control conditions
were reproduced with 6-, 8- and 10year old children in Moscow (20
children in each condition)
Six-year-olds recollected the right
order equally well in both
experimental and control conditions,
whereas 8- and 10-year-olds, like
adults, recollected the order of
events wrongly
Explanation: In 6-year-olds, MBs exist
at the level of consciousness, and the
mechanism of the subconscious
transformation of reality with the aim
of not allowing magical events has
not yet emerged.
Numbers of participants who recollected the
wrong order as a function of condition
Effect 5.2. When confronted with magical intervention in their
conscious lives adults will deny that magical influence had any
effect on their lives (Emotional defense, Experiment 1)
• In one experiment, participants
were offered a magic spell with
the aim to improve their general
satisfaction with their lives. About
30% of participants declined the
offer (Help declined), and the rest
accepted it (Magical suggestion).
In the control condition (No
suggestion), no offer of magical
help was made.
• In all the condition participants
were asked to assess their level of
satisfaction with their lives twice:
during the experiment (but prior
to the offer of magic help) and 2
weeks after.
Effect 5.2 When confronted with magical intervention in their
dreams, adults will devaluate such intervention by seeing
unplanned bad dreams (Emotional defense, Experiment 2)
• In another experiment,
magical help was given in
order to help participants
see their chosen dreams
at night.
• Along with seeing their
chosen Target dreams,
participants in the
magical suggestion
condition reported seeing
scary dreams significantly
more frequently than in
the control condition.
Effect 6.1 When defenses are overcome, adults will
revert to magical beliefs. Experiment 1
•
•
•
•
One way of overcoming the defenses is to
make the denial of magical explanations
costly.
In order to examine this, university
graduates and under-graduates were shown
a “magical effect”—a square plastic card
became cut in two places (or badly
scratched) in an empty box after a magic
spell was cast on the box (Subbotsky, 2001).
Next, the participants were tested under (a)
the low-risk condition, with their driver’s
licenses being at risk of destruction by a
magic spell or (b) the high-risk condition,
with participants’ own hands as objects at
risk of being badly scratched as a result of
the magic spell
In the high-risk condition, 50% of
participants prohibited the magical spell, and
their explanations of why they had done so
revealed that they actually believed that the
magic spell could have damaged their hands.
Effect 6.2 When defenses are overcome, adults will
revert to magical beliefs. Experiment 2
•
•
•
•
Participants were told an imaginary scenario
when a witch approached them on an empty
street and offered to put a magic spell on
their future lives.
In one condition (good spell) the spell aimed
at making participants’ rich and happy, and in
another condition (bad spell) it aimed at
making participants servants to evil forces
(the devil).
In the previous experiments, it was
established that participants who strongly
claim that they don’t believe in magic, react
to the offer of the good spell in the
proportion of 50x50.
If the participants claim of their disbelief in
magic is true, then the same distribution of
the “yes” and “no” answers should be
expected. If this claim is false, then the
number of participants who reject bad spell
should be significantly higher than 50%.
Effect 6.3 When defenses are overcome, adults will
revert to magical beliefs. Experiment 3
•
•
•
•
Another way of overcoming defenses is through
making MBs an object of exploration. Exploring
phenomena that people think they do not believe
in does not overtly challenge their dominant beliefs,
but instead allows them to play with a “forbidden
reality”.
If magical beliefs are subconscious, then, all other
conditions being equal, a novel and unusual event
will elicits stronger curiosity and exploratory
behavior if its suggested explanation involves an
element of magic than if it does not (The impossible
over possible effect – the I/P)
Participants were shown an unusual phenomenon
(a spontaneous disintegration of a physical object in
an apparently empty box) framed in the context of
either a magical (the impossible event) or a
scientific (the counterintuitive possible event)
explanation.
Both children and adults showed the I/P effect.
They were more likely to run the risk of losing their
valuable objects in order to explore the impossible,
magical event than the same event framed in a nonmagical context
Effect 7. In contrast to Western educated adults, uneducated nonWestern participants will endorse magical beliefs both in their verbal
explanations and non-verbal behavior
•
•
Experiments in which participants were
tested under (a) the low-risk condition,
with their important documents being at
risk of destruction by a magic spell or (b)
the high-risk condition, with participants’
own hands were at risk of being badly
scratched as a result of the magic spell,
were repeated with uneducated peasants
in a rural area of central Mexico.
In the low-risk condition, Mexicans proved
to be stronger believers in magic than
Britons both in their verbal judgments and
practical actions, but in the high risk
condition the difference only stayed for
the verbal judgments. In the action trial,
the difference between Britons and
Mexicans narrowed down to the
insignificant level.
Low risk (document)
High risk (hand)
The old picture of magical beliefs in
modern people
• Emerged in the 1st half of the XXth century, in
the works on cultural anthropology (Taylor,
Frazer, Levy-Brühl) and developmental
psychology (Piaget, Büler)
• Magical beliefs is the old fashioned mode of
thinking that existed in the past centuries,
and still exists in young children today but
disappears in older children and adults
The new picture
• Modern people cannot be divided into those
who believe in magic and those who don’t.
• Rather, everyone is a believer in magic, with
the differences only being in how deep in the
subconscious MBs are buried and how strong
psychological defenses are.
• If this picture is true, then it has important
implications both for theory and for practice.
Theoretical implications
• Far from being buried in the past history, magical beliefs
survive in the modern world, by going into the
subconscious.
• In the world where science reigns, magical beliefs disguise
themselves through dropping their “old skin” (association
with the magical power of gods and ancestral spirits) and
taking on the “new skin” (association with the powers of
society, evolution, and natural selection).
• Stripped of its original sacred context and renamed as
suggestibility, compliance, and obedience, modern peoples’
vulnerability toward communicative magic survives in
societies that otherwise strictly adhere to science and
rational logic.
Practical implications
• According to psychoanalysis, subconscious thoughts
and beliefs have energy, and this energy can be
accessed
• If the energy of subconscious magical beliefs is
accessed, it can be used for enhancing the
effectiveness of various practices, such as
• cognitive functioning and problem solving
• political control over the groups of people
• commercial advertising,
• entertainment industry
• and psychotherapies
Accessing the energy of MBs for improving
cognitive functioning in children
• Thinking: exposing children to a movie with
magical effects enhances their ability to solve
creative cognitive tasks (Subbotsky, Hystead &
Jones, 2010, Perceptual & Motor Skills, 111, 1,
261-277)
• Perception: exposing children to a movie with
magical effects improved their ability to
discriminate fantastical visual displays from
realistic ones (Subbotsky & Slater, 2011,
Perceptual & Motor Skills, 112, 2, 603-609)
Accessing the energy of MBs for the purposes of
commercial advertising
• Adolescents and adults were exposed to a
series of TV commercials that either employed
or not employed magical effects. Memories of
participants for these adverts were assessed
immediately after the exposure and in two
weeks time. Participants recognised products
advertized in magical adverts to a significantly
better extent than those that featured in nonmagical adverts ( Subbotsky & Matthews,
2011, Psychological Reports, 109, 2, 1-11)
Accessing the energy of MBs for the purposes of
political influence
• Early forms of political control relied on magical beliefs (Frazer,
1923; Jaynes, 1976; Levy-Bruhl, 1985). For instance, in Egypt the
power of the pharaoh took its legitimacy from the mass belief in
the pharaoh’s divine origins. In the common view today, in modern
industrial societies political power is based on rationally controlled
electoral processes, and not on magical beliefs. Nevertheless,
psychological mechanisms that make many people collaborate with
the political power today retain some features of worshiping the
gods (Malinowski, 1935; Tambiah, 1990).
• In the democratic electoral process today, “elections are won and
lost not primarily on ‘the issues’ but on the values and emotions of
the electorate, including the ‘gut feelings’” (Westen, 2007, p. 423).
Subconscious magical beliefs can well be among these “gut
feelings”.
Accessing the energy of MBs for the purposes
of military and political terror
• The success of kamikaze (“divine wind”) in the Battle of Okinawa (April
1945), which strongly impacted the U. S. decision to use the atomic bomb
in order to end the war, showed the power of magical beliefs, given that
kamikaze were volunteers sacrificing their lives to their divine values
• Anthropological research on suicidal terrorism today suggests that at the
core of this kind of terrorism are “sacred values” that supercede economic
and other material considerations (Atran, Axelrod, & Davis, 2007).
• In the list of such values, a component that is particularly important is
religion. It has been found that most Palestinian suicide bombers do not
differ from the average member of their community in terms of education,
well-being, or mental health—yet “all were deeply religious, believing
their actions sanctioned by the divinely revealed religion of Islam” (Atran,
2003, p. 1537)
• It would be wrong to reduce the phenomenon of suicidal terrorism to
religious belief only, yet the belief in a magical unity with God’s will, and
the belief in great rewards waiting in the afterlife, undoubtedly make the
decision to commit a suicidal act of terror more psychologically acceptable
Accessing the energy of MBs for the purposes of
entertainment
• As the Effect 6.3 showed, both children and adults showed
were more likely to run the risk of losing their valuable
objects in order to explore the impossible, magical event
than the equally unexplainable counterintuitive possible
event.
• This can explain the phenomenal financial success of such
magical masterpieces of the entertainment industry as
Rowlings’ “Harry Potter”, Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” and
Cameron’s “Avatar”.
• In the modern world, many rational people are tempted by
the enchantment of magic, and this temptation is powered
by their suppresses and subconscious magical beliefs.
Conclusion
• Out of the ruins of the old view on magical beliefs,
there emerges a new discipline: cognitive
developmental science of magical thinking and magical
beliefs in modern humans.
• Potentially, this discipline can link together phenomena
that so far have been studied in separation: magical
and religious beliefs, indirect suggestive and
persuasion effects, some instances of “brainwashing”,
effects in the area of disgust and fear of contagion, the
appeal of psychedelic drugs, superstitions and beliefs in
the paranormal, and other effects that employ the
hidden but powerful energy of the magical mind.