The Dangers of Magical Thinking
An Article of the Modern Survival Guide
Of the many traps that you will encounter as you meander through the dark forests of life, one of the most insidious is the concept of “magical” thinking. We have recently seen something of an upswing in this kind of thought, and it’s bloody dangerous. You should know what it is, know how to spot it, and avoid it like the plague. Or at least, you should avoid it like you ought to avoid the plague; I know that precept hasn’t been the most well-followed recently.
“Magical” thinking is pretty easy to define — it’s the idea that things will just happen without a clear causal element.
You might be familiar with this idea; some people sell it as manifesting, some people sell it as miracles, some people sell it as natural inevitability or an “end of history” argument. For others it manifests as superstition (the proverbial lucky sock). They’re all wrong. Nothing — nothing — just happens on its own, or for that matter even remains stable (because the law of entropy hasn’t been repealed).¹ There’s always a causal element, something that pushes the direction of results, and when dealing with any kind of social issue the causal element is always at least partly human.²
Magical thinking is still amazingly common, even in an era when the average person has more access to information than at any other time in human history. It might even be more common because of the glut of information in our society; it’s easy to get ahold of bad ideas. Looking around will show you numerous recent examples, from the infamous “COVID will just go away” idea of equally infamous Trump press conferences, to the constant prayers for miraculous intervention that accompany virtually any religious experience, to the idea of “manifesting” change that is so common in new age thinking.
It’s easy to see why magical thinking is so popular, of course: it completely removes the stress of knowing that you have to do something. If COVID is going to miraculously vanish, lockdowns and mask mandates aren’t needed and you can just live your life. No muss, no fuss, maybe some people die but it’s not your problem. If you let go and let God, then whatever the problem is, it’s God’s problem to solve and you’re absolved of it. If all you need to do to make a positive change in your life is believe really hard that things will get better, then that’s a LOT easier than taking a class at community college.
And so on, and so forth. Magical thinking is infectious, easy, and subject to groupthink phenomena. It feeds off of other belief systems, and humans seem to be wired to accept it. With that being said, you should make an effort to avoid it, because magical thinking is dangerous in (at least) the following three ways:
- It reduces the likelihood of positive change — Wishing doesn’t make reality, and waiting for a magical fix is the equivalent of doing nothing. While change will certainly happen as a result of doing nothing, because change happens whatever you do, it likely won’t be in your favor.
- It detracts from real solutions — Those who seek miracles find miracles. That’s a statement about confirmation bias, not the prevalence of miraculous occurrences. If you look for miracles long enough, and think you’ve found a few, you’re more likely to rely on them and less likely to take personal action. To return to the COVID example, magical thinking harms us by devaluing real solutions. Masking and vaccines work, but people who believe COVID will simply vanish into the aether are much less likely to use these actual solutions and rely instead on expecting things to magically get better.
- It decreases your ability to think critically — Magical thinking relies on events occurring without a clear causal element. To take the example of the lucky sock, there is no way that my wearing or not wearing a sock has any impact on a ball game. The sock doesn’t touch the players; they don’t even know I’m wearing my lucky sock. This kind of magical thinking gets me in the habit of incorrect assumptions about how one object or event affects another. This is sloppy thinking, and a bad habit to fall into.
The most frustrating part about magical thinking is that people who are stuck in this error usually don’t know that they’re thinking magically. This is because, as I’ve mentioned in other articles, the human brain simply is not set up to be a scientific analytical engine by default; it draws the simplest conclusion from the available data, and runs with it. A + B = C. If you wear your lucky sock and your team wins the game, your sock must be lucky because your team won the game. If you leave off your lucky sock and your team loses, it must be because you didn’t wear your lucky sock. As long as there is enough correlation to draw a link, the brain just runs with it.
We all have a responsibility to avoid magical thinking, and there is a method you can use to do this. Follow this steps:
- Repeat after me: correlation is not causation. Just because two things happen in sequence does not mean they are connected. Our brains have a lot of trouble with this concept, so it bears repeating. But when you do see one thing happen in sequence with another, there might be a connection.
- Look for an actual casual connection. If one thing causes another, there is always a connection. There is no action at a distance, there is no magic. Your lucky sock cannot affect the game because there is no way it is physically or mentally affecting any of the players. Cold weather patterns, on the other hand, might be affecting the game; this is a better explanation for why the team wins when you wear your lucky sock. Both you and the team are responding to an external condition; the team plays better when it’s cool, and you are more likely to wear socks when it’s cool as well.
- Look for evidence to prove the connection. Try to pin down and, if possible, quantify the link between two events. To continue the example, weather patterns are known and recorded events, people take such things seriously in sports, and someone is probably tracking that metric. Check to see if your team is statistically more likely to win when it’s cooler outside. Then check to see if they have publicly stated that they like the colder weather, or if their training regimen specifically accounts for cold weather. If you find several pieces of evidence that point to cold weather being a factor, it’s very likely you’ve found an actual point of causation.
- See if you can predict future events based on the causal factor. Once you think you’ve got a point of causation nailed down, see if you can predict an outcome based on that point. If you think your team does better in cold weather, track their performance based on the weather. If they win in the cold at a higher than average rate, you’ve got a potential link. If not, you don’t.
Does this seem familiar? Does it sound like something you might have heard before? If so, that’s because this is just the scientific method all over again. The good old “observe, hypothesize, collect data, test, and then form a theory” model of exploring the universe that we’ve heard since grade school. It is the traditional, best, and for now only counter to magical thinking that we possess, and I suggest that you use it as a matter of course.
Magical thinking isn’t going away. It’s constantly, relentlessly promoted, sometimes even by people with good intentions. But it is at best useless and at worst harmful, so it is to your benefit to identify it, stay away from it, and learn to think without resorting to magical props. Look for causation, and look for evidence. If none exists, A + B does not equal C, it just equals “?”. And maybe that’s the key lesson here: it’s ok to not know how one thing affects another, as long as you’re honest about your ignorance. It’s ok to not know how your team wins the game. It’s not advisable to believe that they win because of your lucky sock.
¹Entropy is the natural inclination of any system to become more disorganized with time. This is also known as the second law of thermodynamics, but it applies equally well to social structures and organizations of all types.
²Moreover, this casual element is never supernatural or anything other than mundane unless proven otherwise, and no one has ever been able to prove otherwise. It’s never aliens… until it’s aliens. Always assume that any causal element is something based in the known world, unless it it excessively proven otherwise by qualified investigators. There’s a wider discussion of other aspects of magical thinking here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/magical-thinking
