Magical Thinking: Development and Applications

In this lecture I will discuss the issue of whether children's magical beliefs can affect the course of their cognitive development. I will show that magical thinking and creative thinking have a common feature: divergent thinking. I will present an experiment that examined the possibility of improving creativity in children through engaging the children in magical activity.

In this lecture I will show why the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality is important for children's everyday life. I will present a study, which aimed at examining the link between magical thinking and the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. I will then discuss practical implications of children's magical thinking for education.

In this lecture you will learn why people remember strange things better than ordinary things. I will then present the study, which examined the effect of magical thinking on human memory, and assess implications that this effect has for advertising industry.

In this lecture I will show how magical suggestion works through the mechanism of participation. I will then contrast two different mechanisms of persuasion: rational explanation and suggestion. Next, I will present an experiment, which aimed to examine whether ordinary suggestion is based on the same psychological mechanism as magical suggestion - the mechanism of participation. I will conclude the lecture analysing how suggestive messages used in politics, economics and religion today use people's hidden magical believes in order to manipulate with the people's minds.

In this lecture I will show that there are two types of imaginary objects: imaginary objects that simulate real physical objects (i.e., an imaginary pencil) and fantastic objects that don't have referents in reality (i.e., a flying dog with wings). I will tell you about an experiment, which aimed to examine to which extent a magic spell can affect real physical, imaginary physical and fantastic objects in children's and adults' minds. We will see that children don't distinguish between imaginary physical and fantastic realities, but adults do.

In this lecture I will review experiments, which showed that both children and adults are significantly more interested in exploring magical events than exploring novel and interesting physical events - the effect that I call "The impossible over the possible effect," (the I/P effect). I will then analyse psychological causes of the I/P effect, and discuss what practical implications the I/P effect has for the everyday life.

In this lecture I will report an experiment, which aimed to compare magical beliefs of people coming from two different cultures: Britain and Mexico. I will show that under normal circumstances British people believe in magic to a significantly lesser extent than Mexican people. However, when it gets to the guts, British people show almost the same degree of magical beliefs as do Mexican people.

In this lecture I will present experiments that show how people's memory distorts reality in order to "out explain" observed magical events as ordinary tricks and thus maintain the people's belief in psysical causality. This distortion, which I call "Cognitive defense against magical intervention", builds up in older children and adults as a result of pressure that science and scientific education exert on children's magical beliefs. Interestingly, in preschool children, who believe in magic openly, the cognitive defense against magical intervention in absent.

In this lecture I will present experiments, which show that people have the tendency to subconsciously protect themselves against magical intervention not only at a cognitive level, but also at an emotional level. I will show that people's attitude towards magic is complex and ambivalent: people are interested in experimenting with magic and benefiting from it, and yet they harbor a subconscious fear that tampering with magic might involve a cost. To avoid paying such cost, people subconsciously distort the results of magical intervention, thus devaluating magical help.