5. To name is to rule.
Just as thoughts and objects have power, so do names. Language's ability to dredge up associations acts as a spell over us. Piaget argued that children often confuse objects with their names, a phenomenon he labeled nominal realism. Rozin and colleagues have demonstrated nominal realism in adults. After watching sugar being poured into two glasses of water and then personally affixing a "sucrose" label to one and a "poison" label to the other, people much prefer to drink from the "sucrose" glass and will even shy away from one they label "not poison." (The subconscious doesn't process negatives.) Rozin has also found that people are reluctant to tear up a piece of paper with a loved one's name written on it. Arbitrary symbols carry the essence of what they represent. Along a similar vein, "the name Adolf dropped off very sharply in the 1940s," Rozin points out.
6. Karma's a bitch.
In eighth grade, a conniving kid named Kevin made a sport of getting under my skin, mocking me for everything from my haircut to my shoelaces. I wanted nothing more than to kick him where it counted. But I never had to. On field day he had a little incident with a bicycle handlebar. With his manhood maimed, I couldn't help but feel a sense of justice in the universe. He was asking for it.
Belief in a just world puts our minds at ease: Even if things are beyond our control, they happen for a reason. The idea of arbitrary pain and suffering is just too much for many people to bear, and the need for moral order may help explain the popularity of religion; in fact, just-worlders are more religious than others. Faith in cosmic jurisprudence starts early. Harvard psychologists showed that kids ages 5 to 7 like a child who found $5 on the sidewalk more than one whose soccer game got rained out.
But belief in a just universe can also prevent one from fighting for more justice—the blame-the-victim effect. If a test subject is submitted to painful shocks that he can't escape, people think less of him; it's comforting to assume that he must deserve it somehow.
Jinxes—in the form of tempting fate—are closely related to karma. Jesse Bering, a psychologist at Queen's University in Belfast, studies the evolutionary psychology of religion. He argues that assuming that an omniscient being can read our minds and strike us down for our immorality keeps us from misbehaving and thus being ousted by our social group. I'm an atheist, but I asked him if fear of targeted lightning bolts might explain why I nevertheless feel the need to knock on wood when I merely think to myself something like, "Gee, I haven't had a cold in months" (a habit that also implicates rules 3 and 4). "We're still thinking that the universe is keeping moralistic tabs on us; if we think we've outsmarted this agency or somehow cheated it—from giving us a cold like everyone else, for example—it will seek to humble us through a sharp dose of reality. The ritual of wood-knocking somehow satisfies or pleases the universe and preempts it from intentionally punishing us."
7. The world is alive.
To believe that the universe is sympathetic to our wishes is to believe that it has a mind or a soul, however rudimentary. We often see inanimate objects as infused with a life force. After watching The Velveteen Rabbit as a kid, I desperately wanted my own plush bear to come alive. When I asked my mom if loving something enough can make it real, she said no. It broke my heart. It's not that we think all matter is fully alive—even babies are surprised when inanimate objects appear to move on their own—it's that we feel all matter has that potential. I know intellectually that I can't bring objects to life, but I still feel irrational anger toward a piece of toast when it drops from my hand—and have been known to stomp on it in retaliation.
Lindeman Marjaana, a psychologist at the University of Helsinki, defines magical thinking as treating the world as if it has mental properties (animism) or expecting the mind to exhibit the properties of the physical world. She found that people who literally endorse phrases such as, "Old furniture knows things about the past," or, "An evil thought is contaminated," also believe in things like feng shui (the idea that the arrangement of furniture can channel life energy) and astrology. They are also more likely to be religious and to believe in paranormal agents.
Subbotsky says there are benefits to thinking animistically. "It's much more comfortable to think that your fate is written down in a constellation of stars than that you're one of a certain group of intelligent animals who are lost in frozen space forever." And magical thinking doesn't necessarily interfere with practical life, he adds: "You can be a believer in astrology and still be a good astronomer." —Matthew Hutson
Magical thinking can be plotted on a spectrum, with skeptics at one end and schizophrenics at the other. People who endorse magical ideation, ranging from the innocuous (occasional fear of stepping on sidewalk cracks) to the outlandish (TV broadcasters know when you're watching), are more likely to have psychosis or develop it later in their lives. People who suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder also exhibit elevated levels of paranoia, perceptual disturbances, and magical thinking, particularly "thought-action fusion," the belief that your negative thoughts can cause harm. These people are compelled to carry out repetitive tasks to counteract their intrusive thoughts about unlocked doors or loved ones getting cancer. But more magical thinking does not necessarily mean more emotional problems—what counts is whether such thinking interferes with everyday functioning.
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