Magic and Superstition

We generally call something magical or superstitious if it involves human agency (as distinct from religion), and invokes causes inconsistent with current understandings, by relevant "experts," (e.g., Western scientists) of how the world operates.

Magical beliefs and activities have been understood by historians (Thomas 1971), psychologists (Freud 1950; Piaget 1929), and anthropologists (Frazer 1890; Mauss 1902) as primitive attempts to understand and control the world. Some of these authors posit an "evolutionary" or developmental course, with magic replaced over historical time, first by religion and ultimately by science. This hypothesized progression cannot account for the high incidence of magical beliefs in educated late twentieth century adults in the developed world, in the face of the great advances of science in the twentieth century.

Why do these beliefs (and actions) persist? The adaptive human tendency to understand, control, and make meaning out of occurrences in the world probably lies at the heart of magic and religion. Reliance by scientific explanations on impersonal forces and random events fails to satisfy the human mind, which is inclined to personalize and humanize accounts of events in the world. The pervasiveness of magical beliefs can probably be attributed to three causes: (1) this type of thinking is natural and intuitive for the human mind (though some, e.g., Sperber 1985, propose that ideas such as this may survive because they strikingly depart from intuition and expectations); (2) magical thinking often makes moderately accurate predictions; and (3) a major function of magical acts and rituals is performative (Tambiah 1990).

Why do magical beliefs take the particular form they do? They seem heavily guided by natural intuitions about the nature of the world, and are selected for their ability to give satisfying (including anxiety-reducing) as much as accurate accounts. These intuitions may derive from primary process thought (FREUD), failure to distinguish the self from the world (PIAGET), preprogrammed or readily acquired cognitive heuristics, or the very nature of symbolic thinking.

Since some "magical" beliefs have proven true over time (e.g., the folk belief in mid-19th-century America that cholera was contagious), and since scientific knowledge is by definition open to continuous revision, we focus on the form rather than the accuracy of magical beliefs. We examine two principles that are widespread, specific, and relatively well studied. These are two of the three "laws of sympathetic magic," originally described as aspects of the "primitive" mind by Tylor (1879), Frazer (1890), and Mauss (1902). The laws were conceived as basic features of human thought, projected onto the world, leading to beliefs that things associated or symbolically related in the mind actually go together, and may be causally linked, in the world (see Rozin and Nemeroff 1990; Nemeroff and Rozin 1998; Tambiah 1990 for reviews).

The law of similarity has been summarized as "like produces like," "like goes with like," or "the image equals the object." Likeness is elevated to a basic, often causal principle; the simplest example confounds likeness with identity, hence "appearance equals reality." The adaptive value of this law is clear: generally speaking, if it looks like a tiger, it is a tiger. For humans, this law becomes problematic because humans make artifacts that are imitations of entities in the world, as in drawings or photographs, or more abstractly, the words that represent them. A picture of a tiger does not justify fear. Similarity functions in nonhumans and in young children (presumably from birth); one feature of development is learning about situations in which appearance does not correspond to reality.

Examples of similarity include burning effigies of persons in order to cause harm to them, or reliance on appearance in judging objects when the appearance is known to be deceiving (e.g., avoidance by educated adults of chocolate shaped to look like feces; or difficulty experienced in throwing darts at a picture of a respected person). In the domain of words, Piaget (1929) described as "nominal realism" the child's difficulty in understanding the arbitrary relation of word and referent. Similarly, educated people have difficulty disregarding a label on a bottle (e.g., "poison") that they know does not apply.

The law of contagion holds that when two objects come into even brief physical contact, properties are permanently transmitted between them ("once in contact, always in contact"). Contagion typically flows from a valenced source (e.g., a detested or favorite person), often through a vehicle (e.g., clothing or food) to a target, usually a person. Traditional examples include the idea that food or objects that have been in contact with death, disease, or enemies will cause harm if eaten or contacted, or that damage done to a separated part of a person (e.g., a piece of hair) will damage that person (sorcery).

Contagion has clear adaptive value by reducing the risk of transmitting microbes. It is closely associated with the emotion of disgust (disgusting entities are contaminating, i.e., negative contagion), and may have originated in the food context. On the positive side, contagion provides a concrete representation of kinship as shared blood, and may serve as the proximal means to induce kin preferences.

Contagion, in opposition to similarity, holds that things are often not what they appear to be, since they bear invisible "traces" of their histories. Consistent with this sophistication, contagion seems to be absent in young children and all nonhumans. However, contagion is probably present in all normal adult humans.

Magical contagion is shown by educated adults, who, for example, reject a preferred beverage after brief contact with a dead cockroach (Rozin and Nemeroff 1990). Western subjects in situations such as these generally attribute their aversion to health risks; however, they quickly realize that this account is insufficient when their aversion remains after the contaminant has been rendered harmless (e.g., sterilized). Magical thinking often exposes such "head vs. heart" conflicts.

Other examples of contagion in everyday life include celebrity token hunting, valuing of family heirlooms, and the reluctance of many individuals to share or buy used clothing. Sources capable of producing positive contagion ("transvaluation") include loved ones and celebrities. Those capable of producing substantial aversions include virtually any disgusting substance, and a wide variety of people; even unknown healthy others contaminate for most persons, and contamination is enhanced if the person is described as ill or morally tainted.

Some properties of contagion (Rozin and Nemeroff 1990) across situations and cultures are: (1) Physical contact is either definitionally necessary or almost always present; (2) Effects are relatively permanent; (3) Even very brief contact with any part of the source produces almost the full effect (dose and route insensitivity); (4) Negative contagion is more widespread and powerful than positive (negativity dominance); (5) Properties passed may be physical or mental, including intentions and "luck"; (6) Contagion can operate in a "backward" direction, with effects flowing from recipient or vehicle back on to the source (as when one attempts to harm someone by burning a lock of their hair).

The contagious entity or "essence" may be mentally represented in at least three ways (depending on culture, nature of the source, and individual within-culture differences). One is pure association (which does not entail contact, and can be thought of as an artifactual account of contagion), a second is the passage of a material-like essence, and a third is the passage of a spiritual, nonmaterial essence (Nemeroff and Rozin 1994).

Magical thinking varies substantially in quality and quantity across cultures, lifetimes, and history, as well as among adults within a culture. Contagion, particularly via contact with those perceived as undesirable, is omnipresent, and is potentially crippling. While this type of interpersonal contagion is universal, in Hindu India and many of the cultures in Papua, New Guinea (Meigs 1984), it is especially salient in daily life, and has an overt moral significance.

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Dissertations Concerning Magic

-- Paul Rozin and Carol Nemeroff

References

Frazer, J. G. (1890/1959). The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. New York: Macmillan. (Reprint of 1922 abr. ed. T. H. Gaster; original work published 1890.)

Freud, S. (1950). Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Translated by J. Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1913.)

Mauss, M. (1902/1972). A General Theory of Magic. Translated by R. Brain. New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1902: Esquisse d'une theorie generale de la magie. L'Annee Sociologique 1902-1903.)

Meigs, A. (1994). Food, Sex, and Pollution: A New Guinea Religion. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Nemeroff, C., and P. Rozin. (Forthcoming). The makings of the magical mind. In K. Rosengren, C. Johnson, and P. Harris, Eds., Imagining the Impossible: The Development of Magical, Scientific, and Religious Thinking in Contemporary Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nemeroff, C. and P. Rozin. (1994). The contagion concept in adult thinking in the United States: Transmission of germs and interpersonal influence. Ethos. The Journal of Psychological Anthropology 22:158-186.

Piaget, J. (1929/1967). The Child's Conception of the World. Totawa, NJ: Littlefield and Adams. (Original work published 1929.)

Rozin, P., and C. J. Nemeroff. (1990). The laws of sympathetic magic: A psychological analysis of similarity and contagion. In J. Stigler, G. Herdt, and R. A. Shweder, Eds., Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 205-232.

Sperber, D. (1985). Anthropology and psychology. Towards an epidemiology of representations. Man 20:73-89.

Tambiah, S. J. (1990). Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Thomas, K. (1971). Religion and the Decline of Magic. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Tylor, E. B. (1871/1974). Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom. New York: Gordon Press. (Original work published 1871.)

Magic and Superstition

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