14 Facts About Magical thinking

Magical thinking is a type of fallacious thinking and is a common source of invalid causal inferences.

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 psychiatry, magical thinking is a disorder of thought content; here it denotes the false belief that one's thoughts, actions, or words will cause or prevent a specific consequence in some way that defies or circumvents commonly understood laws of causality.

Edward Burnett Tylor coined the term "associative Magical thinking", characterizing it as pre-logical, in which the "magician's folly" is in mistaking an imagined connection with a real one.

Magical thinking too sees magical thinking as fundamentally different from a Western style of thought.

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Magical thinking asserts that in these representations, "primitive" people's "mental activity is too little differentiated for it to be possible to consider ideas or images of objects by themselves apart from the emotions and passions which evoke those ideas or are evoked by them".

Magical thinking described practitioners of magic as projecting their mental states onto the world around them, similar to a common phase in child development.

Boyer and Lienard propose that in obsessive-compulsive rituals — a possible clinical model for certain forms of magical thinking — focus shifts to the lowest level of gestures, resulting in goal demotion.

Magical thinking believes that those practicing magic do not think of an explanatory theory behind their actions any more than the average person tries to grasp the pharmaceutical workings of aspirin.

Magical thinking takes the pill with the premise that there is proof of efficacy.

Magical thinking says that the members of both cultures use the same practical common-sense, and that both science and magic are ways beyond basic logic by which people formulate theories to explain whatever occurs.

Magical thinking suggests that the scientific worldview is distinguished from a magical one by the scientific method and by skepticism, requiring the falsifiability of any scientific hypothesis.

Magical thinking says that because there are no alternatives in societies based on magical thought, a theory does not need to be objectively judged to be valid.

Magical thinking is found particularly in children's explanations of experiences about death, whether the death of a family member or pet, or their own illness or impending death.