Abstract
This chapter discusses the cognitive mechanisms underlying magical beliefs and practices. We first review empirical studies in developmental psychology that address children’s concepts of magic. In particular, these studies focus on how children come to distinguish between events, entities, and agents that violate our intuitive notions of basic causal laws (e.g., gravity) and those that do not. The second part of the chapter reviews anthropological studies on magic (i.e., on witchcraft, shamanism, animism, etc.). The striking feature of these anthropological data is that adults seem to interpret improbable rather than impossible events as magical. From this anthropological evidence, we then suggest that the current theoretical accounts of magic in developmental psychology and cognitive science of religion fail to tackle the pervasiveness of “probabilistic-magic”; as a result, it remains to be elucidated why people resort to magical explanations when faced with merely improbable events. To this end, we propose a new probabilistic account of magic, which predicts that supernatural explanations are triggered every time a complexity drop (i.e., a gap between expected and observed complexity) occurs. Finally, we address the question of knowing how “counterintuitive-magic” and “probabilistic-magic” are respectively instantiated across development and cultures.
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Notes
- 1.
Data about Shipibo culture have been collected by one of us (MF) on his fieldwork located in the Peruvian Amazon. Magic in Shipibo culture will be further discussed below.
- 2.
For an evolutionary proposal as to how religion—with its otherworldly orientation—emerged, see: Baumard, Hyafil, Morris, & Boyer, (2015).
- 3.
“[In both magic and science,] the succession of events is assumed to be perfectly regular and certain, being determined by immutable laws, the operation of which can be foreseen and calculated precisely; the elements of caprice, of chance, and of accident are banished from the course of nature.” (Frazer, 1922, p. 49). See also Ruth Benedict (1933, p. 40).
- 4.
The Azande are an ethnic group of North Central Africa. In the 1920s and 1930s, Evans-Pritchard extensively studied Zande communities located in today’s South Sudan.
- 5.
- 6.
Minimally counterintuitive concepts are created as follows: “First, take an ordinary concept, such as “tree”, “shoe”, or “dog”, that meets all of the naturally occurring assumptions of our categorizers and describers. Then violate one of the assumptions. For instance, as a bounded physical object, a tree activates the nonreflective beliefs governing physical objects, including being visible. So make the tree invisible […], and you have an MCI [minimally counterintuitive concept]” (Barrett, 2004b, p. 22).
- 7.
Henceforth the concept of “algorithmicity” (and its adjective “algorithmic”) will be only used in a Kolmogorovian sense. The term strictly refers to the algorithmic information theory and the calculation of the complexity of objects (such as strings).
- 8.
For details on the concept of compressibility, see: Li and Vitanyi (1997, p. 108 et sq.)
- 9.
It is worth noting that the experienced ease (or difficulty) in encoding Falk and Konold are referring to is closely related to (if not synonymous with) the feeling of fluency (Unkelback & Greifeneder, 2013). This concept, which has extensively been discussed in the field of metacognition, is usually defined as the ease of information processing. Feelings of fluency are notably characterized by their phenomenology (Reber, Fazendeiro, & Winkielman, 2002; Schwarz & Clore, 2007).
- 10.
See: Dessalles (2007, 2010). As a matter of fact, Dessalles identifies about a dozen of types of complexity drops. In this chapter, we discuss only three of them. However, several types of complexity drops singled out by Dessalles share commonalities and could therefore arguably be grouped together.
- 11.
Note that cognitive science of religion is not restricted to the study of religion stricto sensu. Many researchers working in this field are investigating shamanism, magic, witchcraft, etc.
- 12.
Cf. Boyer (2001, pp. 302–304). For a critical discussion of Boyer’s assumptions, see Fortier (in press).
- 13.
It is worth remarking that the supernaturalness of the agency at hand is still quite limited: admittedly, no natural agent can invisibly close a door, but it remains that closing a door, unlike turning fortune into misfortune, is not an outstanding feat.
- 14.
This is Bronner’s own term. It must be pointed out that what is meant exactly by “homogeneity” remains rather vague. The term clearly seems to overlap with the concept of simplicity. The problem, however, is that Bronner does not provide any formal mathematical definition of homogeneity. As a consequence, no straightforward prediction can be made. By contrast, Dessalles’ theory and the CDMS are grounded on neat formalism.
- 15.
It could be objected that sometimes science does produce theories liable to be competitive with magic and to demystify it. For example, when Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky (1985) attempt to demonstrate that the “hot hand” phenomenon is a sheer fallacy, it seems that their scope indeed overlaps that of magic. But two remarks are in order: first, it is important to underline that scientific investigations demystifying magic are much rarer than those demystifying religion; second, demystification attempts against magic do not seem to be as successful as those against religion. In this regard, it is worth noting that a series of recent studies seem to invalidate Gilovich et al.’s analysis and to demonstrate that the hot hand phenomenon is in fact real (Bocskocsky, Ezekowitz, & Stein, 2014; Raab, Gula, & Gigerenzer, 2012; Sun & Wang, 2010). By and large, when a cognitive psychologist objects to believers in magic that their beliefs are demystified by such and such bias in probabilistic reasoning, believers can still reply: “the existence of a cognitive bias in general does not prove that the very specific complexity drop which happened to me was the result of that bias rather than the manifestation of a genuine non-random (i.e., intentional) process.” Magic aims to explain singular events (not events in general), and science can hardly challenge it in this regard.
- 16.
The first type of coexistence involves an explanatory pluralism across situations or contexts (it is a case of explanatory coexistence only lato sensu because coexistence is not considered under the same conditions). Namely, depending on context, people are likely to explain the same phenomenon (e.g., death) either in natural or in supernatural terms. The second type of coexistence consists in explaining the same phenomenon by resorting to two distinct explanatory frameworks and letting it rather vague as to how the two frameworks are exactly working together. In the third type of coexistence, two frameworks are used to explain distinct aspects of the phenomenon at hand; the explanatory function of each framework is thus clearly specified.
- 17.
In this experiment, the supernatural agent (the shaman, the witch, the medicine man) was defined as an agent able to control complexity drops occurring in the world. Children were presented with videos featuring a character drawing balls from three urns located in front of him. These urns contained black balls and only one single white ball. Importantly, white balls were the only balls containing a reward inside: thus, drawing a white ball was tantamount to being lucky and drawing a black ball tantamount to being unlucky. If the character was drawing a black ball, he was being expectedly “unlucky” (expectedly, because most of the balls were black in the box); if, on the other hand, he was drawing a white ball, he was being unexpectedly “lucky” (unexpectedly, because only a single ball was white in the box). Because urns contained mostly black balls and because balls were being drawn randomly, the character was expected to be most of the time expectedly “unlucky”. This is precisely what was happening in the first phase of the experiment (no improbable outcome occurred). But, in the second phase, the character started to draw balls with a very special glove or performing a special ritual before drawing the balls. Thanks to this “magical” glove or to this “magical” ritual, the character was now drawing only white balls from the urns. The character was thus being unexpectedly lucky; he was somehow able to control the probabilistic unfolding of the events of the world and to make happen only fortunate events (i.e., to make happen only drawings whose outcomes were white balls).
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Claire Zedelius for her detailed and helpful feedback on previous versions of this chapter. This research has been supported by an ERC Advanced Grant “Dividnorm” # 269616.
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Fortier, M., Kim, S. (2017). From the Impossible to the Improbable: A Probabilistic Account of Magical Beliefs and Practices Across Development and Cultures. In: Zedelius, C., Müller, B., Schooler, J. (eds) The Science of Lay Theories. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57306-9_12
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