Evans-Pritchard's account, members of the Azande tribe believe that rubbing crocodile teeth on banana plants can invoke a fruitful crop. The magician believes that thematically linked items can influence one another by virtue of their similarity. Įdward Burnett Tylor coined the term "associative thinking", characterizing it as pre-logical, in which the "magician's folly" is in mistaking an imagined connection with a real one. This association-based thinking is a vivid example of the general human application of the representativeness heuristic. For example, the doctrine of signatures held that similarities between plant parts and body parts indicated their efficacy in treating diseases of those body parts, and was a part of Western medicine during the Middle Ages. As with all forms of magical thinking, association-based and similarities-based notions of causality are not always said to be the practice of magic by a magician. Prominent Victorian theorists identified associative thinking (a common feature of practitioners of magic) as a characteristic form of irrationality. "associative thinking", the association of entities based upon their resemblance to one another.Researchers have identified two possible principles as the formal causes of the attribution of false causal relationships: The use of a lucky charm or ritual, for example, is assumed to increase the probability that one will perform at a level so that one can achieve a desired goal or outcome. In religion, folk religion, and superstitious beliefs, the posited causality is between religious ritual, prayer, meditation, trances, sacrifice, incantation, curses, benediction, faith healing, or the observance of a taboo, and an expected benefit or recompense. 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).
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