The Laws of Sympathetic Magic

THE LAWS OF SYMPATHETIC MAGIC

The laws of sympathetic magic constitute a small but central subset of what might be called magical thinking. They share with the larger category that they promote beliefs about the world that are generally contrary to current scientific beliefs. However, unlike most other examples of magic, the laws of sympathetic magic do not necessarily invoke a sense of human or animate agency as a device to account for events in the world (see Nemeroff & Rozin, 2000; Tambiah, 1990, for a discussion of magical thinking in a broader context). In contrast to the larger category of magical thinking, the laws of sympathetic magic may be more tractable to experimental study for three reasons: (1) they are clearly defined; (2) they are present in abundance as modes of thought among contemporary people in developed societies; and (3) they invoke principles (e.g., contact, resemblance) that are easy to manipulate in the laboratory.

Edwin Tylor (1879), James Frazer (1895), and Marcel Mauss (1902) proposed three laws of sympathetic magic that they took to be universal principles of thinking. The law of contagion holds that “once in contact, always in contact”; when objects make physical contact, essences may be permanently transferred. Thus, fingernail parings contain the “essence” of the person to whom they were previously attached, and foods carry the “essence” of those who prepared them. The law of similarity holds either that like causes like (causes resemble their effects) or appearance equals reality. A prototypical example of similarity is the voodoo practice of burning a representation of an enemy to cause the enemy harm; action on the image is believed to result in effects on the object it represents. The law of opposites, which is not discussed further in this chapter, is the opposite of the first reading of the law of similarity, and holds that causes are the opposite of their effects.

On some important dimensions, contagion is the opposite of similarity. Similarity bears a relation to the principle of generalization, and surely is manifested in nonhuman animals; “appearance equals reality” is a very useful heuristic. Contagion, however, holds that things may not be what they seem. Their history, which may not be represented in their appearance, endows them with important properties.

Recent psychological research on these laws dates from their involvement in the analysis of disgust. For Americans, harmless replicas of disgusting objects are treated as disgusting (similarity), and brief contact with a disgusting entity renders an edible food unacceptable (contagion) (Rozin, Millman, & Nemeroff, 1986). Subsequent work (e.g., Rozin, Nemeroff, Wane, & Sherrod, 1989) established that the laws of sympathetic magic characterize some types of cognitions, even among educated, Western adults. Thus, what has been generally interpreted as a peculiar feature of the thought of “traditional peoples” now appears to be a basic feature of human thinking.

The two laws we discuss qualify as cognitive heuristics; they are rules of thumb that generally work to make sense of the world and promote adaptive behaviors. Generally, causes do resemble their effects, appearance is usually a very good indicator of reality (“If it looks like a tiger, it is a tiger”), and some important entities, such as germs, do pass along some of their nature by virtue of physical contact. However, the laws differ from most of the now classic heuristics, such as availability and anchoring, in two critical ways: (1) invocation of sympathetic magical intuitions is typically associated with a substantial affective component; and (2) people are usually either aware, or can be easily made aware, of the “irrational” aspects of these laws. Thus, when educated Americans refuse to eat chocolate shaped into realistic-looking dog feces, or refuse to eat a food touched by a sterilized cockroach, they are acutely aware that this “makes no sense,” yet acknowledge their feeling of aversion. They can often overcome this aversion and “be rational,” but their preference is not to. They willingly acknowledge their feelings and respond to them, unless pressed. For instance, if the issue of avoiding a harmlessly contaminated object (as with a sterilized cockroach) or a similarity based aversion (e.g., reluctance to use sugar from a bottle labeled cyanide when the individual is certain the bottle contains sugar and never contained cyanide) is tied to money (e.g., “How much would you pay to avoid doing this?”), some college students who acknowledge uncomfortable feelings will perform the act rather than pay anything at all (Rozin, Grant, Weinberg, & Parker, 2000). In other words, money promotes leading with the head as opposed to the heart. Similarly, if one asks a question in an affective way (e.g., “How worried are you?”) as opposed to a cognitive way (e.g., “How likely is it?”), one can either elicit magical thinking or not (e.g., Nemeroff, 1995; Nemeroff, Brinkman & Woodward, 1994). Thus, Nemeroff (1995) found that participants think a disliked person’s germs are more virulent than a loved one’s germs when asked an experiential question, such as, “How sick do you think you would get [from contact]?” However, the effect is not significant if they are asked instead, “How likely would you be to get sick?” In Western developed cultures, there is more conflict than in traditional cultures between magical thinking and prevailing cultural beliefs, and perhaps a greater inclination to support feelings or beliefs with a logical/rational account. Thus, educated and less-educated Westerners and more traditional folk all experience disgust at the prospect of consuming road-kill dog meat. However, educated Westerners, after careful consideration of the situation, overrule their feelings to the extent that they hold that the feelings of disgust do not require a negative moral judgment (because no organism was hurt in this process), whereas less-educated folk are more inclined to move from the emotion or feeling to a moral judgment (Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993).

In one form or another, the laws of sympathetic magic have appeared in the theories of a number of scholars. Freud (1950) saw them as part of the primitive, intuitive mode of thought that he called the primary process. For example, Freud claimed that the primary process does not distinguish between hallucination and reality, somewhat akin to the law of similarity. Piaget (1983) identifies magical thinking as a feature of childhood, and describes the principle of realism, in which the symbol of something is confused with what it represents (similarity).

In line with both Freud and Piaget is the more general position that sympathetic magical thinking is an example of a set of natural and intuitive modes of thought. This idea has been developed in important ways in the contributions of Shweder (1977), Nisbett and Ross (1980), and the very productive line of research on heuristics and biases stimulated by Kahneman and Tversky (1979, 1984) and Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky (1982). Along with this tradition and in keeping with Simon’s (1982) principle of satisficing (using shortcuts that usually approximate ideal analyses), it is recognized that these intuitions, or heuristics, may be adaptive and function well in a wide variety of situations. Perhaps the shortcomings of these intuitive modes of thought have become highlighted by the creation of the modern world, laden as it is with images (two- and three-dimensional representations/imitations) that challenge the law of similarity, or scientific accomplishments that are hard to understand intuitively (e.g., who could ever imagine the speed of light, or risks of 1 in 1,000,000?).