Magic and the Supernatural - Lancaster University

Eugene Subbotsky
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E. Effect 5. When Defenses are Overcome, Adults will Explicitly Acknowledge
Their Magical Beliefs
One way of overcoming the defenses is to make the denial of magical
explanations costly. In order to examine this, university graduates and undergraduates
were shown a ‘magical effect’—a square plastic card became cut in two
places (or badly scratched) in an empty box after a magic spell was cast on the
box. 6
Next, the participants were tested under (a) the low-risk condition, with their
driver’s licenses being at risk of destruction by a magic spell or (b) the high-risk
condition, with participants’ own hands as objects at risk of being badly scratched
as a result of the magic spell.
In the high-risk condition, 50% of participants prohibited the magical spell, and
admitted that they actually believed that the magic spell could have damaged their
hands.
In another experiment in which not participants’ hands only, but their very lives
were at stake, a 100% of educated adults showed behavior consistent with their
belief in magic and explicitly admitted their magical beliefs. 7
3. Theoretical Implications
The traditional view on magical beliefs in people living in Western industrial
cultures emerged in the 1 st half of the XXth century, in the works on cultural
anthropology and developmental psychology. 8 According to this view,
magical beliefs are the old fashioned mode of thinking that
existed in the past centuries, and still exists in young children
and a small population of superstitious individuals today. 9
The results summarized above suggest a new view on magical beliefs in
modern industrial cultures. This view proposes that
modern rational people cannot be divided into those who believe
in magic (i.e., superstitious individuals) and those who don’t.
Rather, everyone is a believer in magic, with individual
differences being only in how deep in the subconscious magical
beliefs are buried and how strong psychological defenses are.
Consciously, an individual can consider himself or herself a
completely rational person who is strictly committed to scientific
views; subconsciously, the person can still hold the belief in
magical causality.
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