Likeness and Likelihood in Everyday Thought: Magical Thinking in Judgments About Personality [and Comments and Reply]

Abstract

Magical thinking has perplexed anthropological theorists for nearly a century. At least three perspectives are extant: (1) Magic is a form of science, a relatively effective set of canons and procedures for acquiring knowledge and exercising control (see, e. g., Levi-Strauss 1966); (2) magic is a form of fantasy, an irrational symbolic attempt to influence uncontrollable events (see, e.g., Malinowski 1954); (3) magic is a form of rhetoric, a persuasive communication designed to arouse sentiments rather than make truth claims about what goes with what in experience (see, e.g., Tambiah 1973). This study presents an alternative, cognitive-processing, account of magical thinking. Magical thinking is an expansion of a universal disinclination of normal adults to draw correlational lessons from their experiences. Correlation and contingency are relatively complex concepts that are not spontaneously available to human thought and are not to be found in the reasoning of most normal adults in all cultures. In the absence of a concept of correlation or contingency normal adults often rely on the more intuitive notions of likeness and resemblance to estimate what goes with what in their experience. They collapse the distinction between likeness and co-occurrence likelihood; they merge the notion of resemblance and the notion of contingency. Magical thinking is a universal characteristic of everyday thought. It is no more distinctive of Zande beliefs that ringworm and fowl excrement go together than, for example, of our own beliefs about what goes with what in personality. In both cases, objects and events that resemble one another are thought to go together or influence oneanother. In both cases, "propositions about language" are confused with "propositions about the world" (D'Andrade 1965). The study presents the results of a series of cognitive experiments supportive of these claims and addresses a number of seminal questions in the "anthropology of though," viz., (1) What does the organization of symbolic systems tell us about the predilections and disinclinations of the human mind? (2) In what ways do symbolic systems influence the intellectual processes of those who use them? (3) How do objects and events give rise to meanings? (4) How are symbolic systems to be described? The study focuses upon the symbolization of individual differences inconduct, i.e., everyday personality theory. One theme of the study is that, for the most part, personality traits cannot be discovered in behavior, but are rather the creations of the magical mind. A second theme of the study is that magical thinking is inductive in its intent but mistaken in its conclusions, a view that some may find reminiscent of such late 19th-century theorists as E. B.Tylor and J. G. Frazer.