Īn important question raised by this interpretation is how mere symbols could exert material effects. As opposed to the direct, mimetic thinking of Frazer, Tambiah asserts that magic utilizes abstract analogies to express a desired state, along the lines of metonymy or metaphor. Tambiah, believe that magic is meant to be expressive, rather than instrumental. Leading thinkers of this category, including Stanley J. 'It is raining because I am sad.'Īnother theory of magical thinking is the symbolic approach. From toddlerhood to early school age, children will often link the outside world with their internal consciousness, e.g. He described practitioners of magic as projecting their mental states onto the world around them, similar to a common phase in child development. Sigmund Freud believed that magical thinking was produced by cognitive developmental factors. More generally, it is magical thinking to take a symbol to be its referent or an analogy to represent an identity. This type of wish fulfillment thinking can result in the avoidance of talking about certain subjects ('speak of the devil and he'll appear'), the use of euphemisms instead of certain words, or the belief that to know the 'true name' of something gives one power over it, or that certain chants, prayers, or mystical phrases will bring about physical changes in the world. Types Direct effect īronisław Malinowski's Magic, Science and Religion (1954) discusses another type of magical thinking, in which words and sounds are thought to have the ability to directly affect the world.

It is a commonly observed symptom in thought disorder, schizotypal personality disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In psychiatry, magical thinking defines false beliefs about the capability of thoughts, actions or words to cause or prevent undesirable events. These beliefs can cause a person to experience an irrational fear of performing certain acts or having certain thoughts because of an assumed correlation between doing so and threatening calamities. In psychology, magical thinking is the belief that one's thoughts by themselves can bring about effects in the world or that thinking something corresponds with doing it. In anthropology, the posited causality is between religious ritual, prayer, sacrifice, or the observance of a taboo, and an expected benefit or recompense. The precise definition of magical thinking may vary subtly when used by different theorists or among different fields of study.

Unlike the confusion of correlation with causation, magical thinking does not require the events to be correlated. Magical thinking is a type of fallacious thinking and is a common source of invalid causal inferences. Examples include the idea that personal thoughts can influence the external world without acting on them, or that objects must be causally connected if they resemble each other or have come into contact with each other in the past. Magical thinking, or superstitious thinking, is the belief that unrelated events are causally connected despite the absence of any plausible causal link between them, particularly as a result of supernatural effects. For other uses, see Magical thinking (disambiguation).

A year of magical thinking