Surviving in the World of the Machines: the Belief in Magic in the Age of Science

1. Surviving in the World of the Machines: the Belief in Magic in the Age of Science Eugene SubbotskyPsychology Department, Lancaster University, UK e.subbotsky@lancaster.ac.uk

2. 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?

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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

11. 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.

13. 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)

14. 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

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. Effect 5.1 Interestingly, in elementary school children cognitive defence against magic is absent • Disappearance and control conditions were reproduced with 6-, 8- and 10-year 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

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. 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%.

22. 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 non-magical context

23. 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 Low risk (document) • 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. High risk (hand)

24. 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

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. 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

28. 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)

29. 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 non-magical adverts ( Subbotsky & Matthews, 2011, Psychological Reports, 109, 2, 1-11)

30. 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 politicalpower 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”.

31. 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

32. 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.

33. 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.