The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking (Matthew Hutson)
OVERVIEW
Are you an atheist who claims to have eliminated all magical thinking from your life? FALSE! Matthew Hutson shows us why in “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking.” This book has it all: from bizarre sports superstitions, fishing rituals, and totally irrational gambling tactics all the way down to the Eucharist and why nobody wants to share a hairbrush with their high school bully.
So what’s “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking” doing on a blog about mortality and meaning? This book, like Jesse Bering’s “The Belief Instinct,” suggests that our desire for meaning is a type of magical thinking – a vestige of teleological reasoning. We search for purpose and pattern because we evolved to do so, not because there is any inherent meaning to be found. It also tackles self-transcendence, death anxiety, and our belief in immortal souls. All my favourite things! It was an instant must-read.
Hutson’s definition of magical thinking is “treating the nonmental as if it had mental properties or vice versa.” The definition also extends to “overattributing mental states to physical objects” (such as in the chapter about animism and anthropomorphism). Magical thinking explains everything from our sentimentality toward family heirlooms to why we yell at our computers. Aside from being completely fascinating, it benefits us all to better understand how we may behave illogically or irrationally without realizing it, and what the triggers might be. In brief, here are the 7 laws of magical thinking:
1. Objects Carry Essences - In the same way that germs can physically contaminate an object, we behave as if psychological essences can be transmitted too. The sentimentality or historicity we attribute to inanimate objects is just as illogical as belief in ghosts. Yet, we tend to feel intuitively like certain objects possess invisible properties. Think of a family heirloom that wouldn’t “feel the same” if it were to be replaced by an identical replica, or how folks are more likely to pay exorbitant amounts for objects touched or used by celebrities.
2. Symbols Have Power - Consider how you’d feel less comfortable throwing darts at a picture of your Mom than you would at a picture of a politician you despise, or how desecrating a flag just feels wrong. Gamblers throw dice more forcefully when they want higher numbers (I have been known to gently “lob” the die when I’m trying to get a one), and most of us have lucky numbers. Our lives are permeated with secular ritual and symbolism.
3. Actions Have Distant Consequences - It seems we are wired to misattribute causality between events. For example, I wore these socks on the day my baseball team won, so now I always wear these socks when I’m playing. Illusory correlations like this are the output of our pattern-seeking minds. Our evolutionary success depended on pattern identification, and so coincidences demand explanation. This false extrapolation of causality is reinforced through confirmation bias and other cognitive quirks.
4. The Mind Knows No Bounds - We are also prone to believe in “mind over matter.” Belief in prayer, clairvoyance, precognition, and even free will are examples. But positive expectations, self-fulfilling prophecies, and confirmation bias are at work here too. Like other types of magical thinking, the feeling that we can control or predict the features of our environment inspires a false sense of safety; we like to feel like we’re in charge. Most interesting to me in this chapter was the experience of wonder or self-transcendence that, while it can certainly be secular, many still attribute to supernatural causes.
5. The Soul Lives On - Freud thought it was the impossibility of imagining our non-existence that drove people to believe in their own immortality. Other philosophers and psychologists posit it’s because our brains are wired to anticipate our futures, so to imagine a future without us goes against our neurocircuitry. Whatever the reason, the bulwarks against death anxiety we have built fall into the framework of magical thinking too. Belief in an enduring soul and some mental life that lives on after death (in the absence of a physical brain) is certainly magical thinking. But so too, Hutson argues, are the safety blankets of symbolic immortality that we cling to. Many of us find comfort in the belief that we will achieve symbolic immortality through our kids, our kind deeds, or the things we brought into the world through our creativity. While they are comforting illusions, Hutson muses “for putting your name in a Hall of Fame to reduce the sting of death, as if your very consciousness would reside on those plaques and in those fans’ memories: while perfectly natural and perhaps essential for sanity, this is a leap that I consider magical thinking.” While many skeptics will retort they don’t actually believe their consciousness will live on, I think Hutson’s point is that if these symbols confer comfort, it must be because there is an underlying assumption (however poorly interrogated) that something of ourselves – something enduring and substantial enough to provide comfort – is projected into the future through these immortality projects.
6. The World is Alive - Treating objects as if they were alive is animism and treating non-human entities as if they had human qualities/emotions is anthropomorphism. Both betray magical thinking. If you remember my review of Jesse Bering’s “The Belief Instinct,” you’ll recall that our tendency to animism and anthropomorphism is caused by an overactive theory of mind – the cognitive architecture built in by evolution that causes us to see minds and agency everywhere. Theory of mind is a useful skill to have – it helps us predict behavior – but there’s spillover. Theory of mind is why God often looks and thinks like us, why we yell at our computers, and why we think our pets can feel human emotions like guilt. And, Hutson argues, this misattribution is most likely when we are lonely, or need to recapture a sense of control.
7. Everything Happens For A Reason - When it comes to the seemingly arbitrary events in our lives, magical thinking can come to the rescue by giving us a sense of predictability and purpose, a sense of meaning. Our baseline programming is teleological – we believe things exist for a preconceived purpose. Events happen for a reason. As Hutson says, we assume design by default. Belief in destiny, fate, and karma is magical thinking, and it extends to our belief in supernatural entities that send us signs. It’s also present in our tendency to search for a purpose when bad things happen (“why me?”). In times of uncertainty, disorder, and chaos, we fall back on what Michael Shermer has called patternicity, pattern-seeking behavior and reasoning that helps us make sense of our environment.
All of us can see pieces of ourselves in these chapters. Matthew Hutson’s mission is to show us that we all fall prey to magical thinking, even the staunchest skeptics among us (Hutson recounts some dialogue from Richard Dawkins in the documentary The Genius of Charles Darwin, where Dawkins appeals to the historicity of certain museum artifacts, and the sentimentality he feels toward his first edition of the Origin of Species). I think one of the true treasures of this book is the humility that it can inspire, especially among the skeptics who feel very self-satisfied in having wholly abandoned superstitious thinking.
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
I mean, cut your superstitious friends some slack? Every type of magical thinking has some element of self-soothing. These cognitive features evolved to inspire a sense of control over our environment and assure us that life is safe and meaningful. It’s accurate to say we all come by this honestly!
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? Yes.
If I had to describe the book in one sentence? The 7 ways you are deceiving yourself.
Who should read this book? Anyone interested in religion and superstition (and all the atheists ready to get annoyed at being told they are prone to magical thinking too).