Years after his death, "John Lennon" returned to tour the United States, especially in the areas affected by natural disasters: on this trip, the former Beatle was simply his piano, in particular the one he composed Imagine. Without protective strings, the musical instrument could be played or played by anyone. "It was like sleeping in your grandfather's sweatshirt at night - familiar, cute and personal," said one survivor of Hurricane Katrina. "He emanates his spirit, what he has believed, and what he has preached for many years," said the director of the he turns, adding that "I have never gone anywhere to say that this is a magic piano that will cure your ills; I had no idea that an inanimate object could give people so much. "
We may not be fans of the Beatles, or the late John Lennon, and we may hate peace and love, but we are intrinsically driven to find meaning in the world. Although we are skeptical, somehow we still believe in magic, and in this Psychology-Online article we are going to discover
Magical thinking, or superstitious thinking, is the belief that unrelated events are causally related despite the absence of any plausible causal relationship between them, especially as a result of supernatural effects.
The belief in these magical and superstitious ways is based on a thought form called pre-logic. In his studies on cognitive development, Piaget (1926) finds magical thinking in the preoperative stage, whereby children build reality based on beliefs such as animism, realism, and magical participation.
- The animism It is configured as the tendency of children to attribute a soul, like living beings, to all objects, animated and not.
- The realismInstead, it consists of the scant distinction between external and internal reality.
- The magic participation refers to the belief that making a particular gesture will influence the occurrence of an event. In this phase, then, the principles of causality as understood by the rational thinking, but are based on different relationships, such as similarity and contiguity.
There are many theories that explain magical thinking. For example, for socio-cognitivists, this way of thinking is attributable to a lack of logical processes, due to the immaturity of the typical cognitive structures of children and primitive peoples. It is not from the same position Moscovici (1997), according to which the thought of the primitives is due to a different global culture within which they are inserted: in primitive peoples, for example, there are no polarities that we consider to ground our thinking, such as between the material and the spiritual.
The presence of magical thinking predominantly in children's mental life and its persistence in adulthood it is justified by three main functions (Bonino, 1994), partially matching:
- Defensive function, founded on the conviction, that this thought feeds, of being able to control reality; This function is essential in the evolutionary age to face situations that cause anguish or insecurity. It is also the reason why some adults regress in problematic situations, resorting to this way of thinking in order not to accept and face reality.
- Propitiatory function, founded on the conviction that there are forces that regulate events, which is fulfilled in all the conditions in which it acts in consideration of these powers.
- Cognitive function, by which magical thinking fills in the gaps in other thought forms and reveals what cannot be logically known.
This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
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Magical thinking: what it is, characteristics, functions and examples
