Superstitious–magical imaginings

Abstract

1. Introduction

Can imagination directly motivate our actions, as belief, jointly with desire, does? This is a hotly debated question among imagination scholars. Naturally enough, the debate centres on cases of actions that seem to escape classic belief–desire explanations and to be best understood as imagination-driven. The most obvious one is the case of pretence actions (see e.g. Nichols and Stich 2000, Currie and Ravenscroft 2002: ch. 6), although in the last few decades other sorts of actions have also been considered (see e.g. Gendler 2007; Sullivan-Bissett 2018; Ichino 2022; van Leeuwen 2023: ch. 3). Here I propose a new argument in favour of imagination’s motivating power, based on a class of actions that has not yet received much consideration in the imagination literature: ‘superstitious–magical actions’.

In §2 I introduce superstitious–magical actions and the peculiar thinking that underlies them. In §3 I argue that superstitious–magical thinking is imaginative in nature. In §4 I argue that superstitious–magical imaginings directly motivate the relevant actions jointly with desires, as beliefs typically do; given how pervasive these actions are, this argument proves not only that imagination can motivate action, but that it does so very often. I conclude in §5 by positioning this account within the growing literature on imagination’s motivating power.

2. Superstitious–magical actions – and thinking

When I was in high school, I always used the same pen for written tests as I took notes with during classes – after all, ‘it already knew the right answers’. At university, I always wore the same ‘lucky shirt’ on exam days. Apparently, I am in good company. Students, athletes, sport fans, musicians, politicians, fishermen and gamblers are all social categories well known for the ‘propitiatory behaviours’ and lucky charms they engage with (Vyse 2014: ch. 2). People also engage in a variety of traditional superstitious practices, like crossing fingers or tossing spilt salt over their shoulder. Empirical surveys show how widespread these and other sorts of superstitious actions are among educated and otherwise rational subjects (Risen 2016) – and evidence from the lab points in this direction too (see e.g. Rozin et al.’s (1986) studies, which found subjects unwilling to drink from a bottle labelled ‘Poison’, while acknowledging it actually contained sugared water).

What all these actions have in common is the peculiar thinking that they seem to presuppose: a kind of thinking that tends to exaggerate the meaningfulness and purposefulness of the world, seeing mindedness, agency and causal connectedness where in fact there is none (or seeing more of them where there is less) – thereby making category mistakes where the core attributes of mental and physical entities are conflated. This is what I call superstitious–magical thinking, in the terms of which I define the actions I am interested in. Superstitious–magical actions, on this view, are actions that are driven by the sort of thinking just described.¹

Importantly, this sort of thinking also underlies many actions that we do not typically consider superstitious or involving properly ‘magical’ elements. Take, for instance, cases in which we talk to (or about) inanimate things as if they had a mind and could understand us – like when we ask the door to ‘please remain shut’. Or cases of symbolic behaviour – like kissing the picture of someone you love. Or other similar cases that Velleman (2000) dubbed ‘expressive behaviours’ – like yelling at the corner of the table when you bump into it. All these actions arguably presuppose the kind of thinking I described, which exaggerates the extent to which mindedness and agency are manifested in the world, to the point of running into ontological confusions. So these actions belong to my category of superstitious–magical actions, which thereby turns out to be large and pervasive.² If I prove that such actions are (often) imagination-driven, this will have important implications for our assessment of imagination’s motivating power, which have not yet been noted.

3. Superstitious–magical thoughts as imaginings

What kind of mental states, functionally speaking, are superstitious–magical thoughts – and, whatever they are, how do they interact with our other mental states to motivate action? Here are two options.

Defending the Imagination Account will involve two tasks: first, arguing that superstitious magical thoughts are imaginings; second, arguing that such imaginings are what directly motivate the relevant actions. In this section I focus on the first task, in the next section, on the second.³

The task is arguably easier for some of the thoughts I mentioned. Many would probably grant that when I ask the door to ‘please remain shut’ I just imagine that the door can understand me, and when I kiss the picture of my beloved I just imagine that I am thereby kissing him. I shall return to these cases later on, but for now I focus on those for which my claim sounds more controversial: cases of superstitious thoughts in the strict sense – thoughts like ‘wearing that shirt brings good luck’ – which are generally understood as instances of genuine, albeit superstitious, beliefs.

Why take such thoughts to be beliefs? My opponent’s response cannot be that such thoughts seem to produce behavioural outputs, and behavioural outputs are a mark of belief. If this were the only reason to classify superstitious thoughts as beliefs, appealing to this reason would be question-begging on her part, since what I argue here is precisely that imagination, too, can produce behavioural outputs in much the same ways in which belief does. I will then show that there are no other good reasons to classify superstitious thoughts as beliefs, since if we look at other aspects of their functional profile – that is, at the inputs from which they are formed/revised and their relationships with other mental states – superstitious thoughts behave like paradigmatic imaginings. I will not argue that this is always/necessarily the case. There certainly are (and even more: there have been in history) cases of superstitious thoughts that are genuinely believed. But this is not true of many instances of contemporary superstitions, which behave as paradigmatic imaginings.

Take first superstitions’ formation. Far from being the product of evidence-tracking mechanisms, superstitions arise from a tendency to ‘leap beyond’ the available evidence, following the lead of our desires and motives. In particular, psychologists emphasize the role of our desires for control and for meaning, which superstitions satisfy by providing a reassuring picture of the world as a coherent, purposeful and controllable place, rather than an opaque, random and unjust one (Lindeman 1998: 258–60, Vyse 2014: 159–61, Risen 2016: 188).

While we know that such motivational factors can also have a role in the formation of genuine belief, this is not the key role that they play in the case of superstitions – where, conversely, the role of evidence is merely a causal, triggering one. Superstitious thoughts are prompted by evidence in the associative ways that are characteristic of imaginative prompting. The observation that I did well in an exam when I wore a given outfit, together with my desire for control (and for success), prompts me to imagine those outfits to be causally relevant. Seeing other people crossing fingers and knocking on wood prompts us to imagine that those behaviours ‘bring luck’ as we wish they could. Seeing a bottle labelled ‘Poison’ prompts participants in Rozin’s experiment to imagine that it actually contains poison. And the same happens in the follow-up experiment, where the fact that the representation of the bottle as containing poison is associatively triggered by evidence, rather than formed in response to it, becomes even more evident, given that the representation is the reaction to a label which reads ‘NOT Poison’.

The argument so far relies on the view that at least some degree of evidence-sensitivity crucially distinguishes belief from imagination when we consider how these two attitudes are formed. Superstitious thoughts fail to display even a minimal degree of such sensitivity, so they are better classified as imaginings.

Admittedly, not everyone will accept this strong constraint on belief formation. But even those who are more liberal on belief formation, holding that beliefs do not necessarily arise in response to evidence, may agree on the fact that, however they are formed, beliefs must be evidence-sensitive at another level, having to do with the way in which they are revised and interact inferentially with other beliefs in subjects’ minds. Beliefs respond to the evidence constituted by other beliefs in the same system, in such a way that that when contradictions are detected between a given belief and other beliefs that one holds, revisions are made in order to resolve such contradictions and restore some inferential integration – or, at least, some pressure to do that is felt.

This is what Ganapini (2020) called the ‘minimal rationality constraint’ on belief, which is accepted, more or less explicitly, by many authors, including Ganapini herself, Velleman (2000), Currie and Ravenscroft (2002: 176), Gendler (2007, 2008), van Leeuwen (2014, 2023: ch. 2), Levy (2015), Dub (2017) and Ichino (2019, 2022, 2023).⁴

Imaginings are not like that. They may display some degrees of integration with each other and with some of one’s beliefs, but it is entirely possible – and often happens – that we consciously hold imaginings with openly contradictory contents (as when we switch between incompatible scenarios in counterfactual reasoning) and imaginings that contradict most of our conscious beliefs (Currie and Ravenscroft 2002: 16, Kind 2016, Ichino 2023).

It is on this dimension of ‘inferential patchiness’ vs. inferential integration that the functional match between superstitious attitudes and imagination – and the corresponding difference with belief – looks most striking. One of the most notable features of superstitious attitudes is indeed the fact of being held in evident contradiction with many consciously held beliefs.

This fact is not surprising if we recall that, being a natural product of how our mind works, superstitious thinking is ubiquitous in the cognitively normal population. Against the traditional view that relegated this kind of thinking to primitive/ignorant people, research now shows ‘how pervasive it is among intelligent, emotionally stable adults’ (Risen 2016: 182) – without even finding clear evidence of an inverse correlation with levels of education received (Vyse 2014: 49–51). This means that most of us hold superstitious attitudes that are in tension with many of our beliefs. And what is most striking is that we are often fully aware of such tensions, and yet we do not feel much pressure to resolve them – as in the anecdote in which Niels Bohr was asked about a horseshoe on his door, and replied that of course he did not believe such nonsense but he knew it helped even if one does not believe it.

This sort of openly recognized contradiction between one’s superstitions and one’s beliefs has long been familiar to psychologists. Campbell (1996: 156) identifies it as the key feature of ‘modern superstition’, noting that:

If asked, practitioners of modern superstition are typically unable to formulate any reason why the actions they engage in take the form they do. Typically, people simply do not attempt to defend their practices; on the contrary, they often seem only too ready to admit that they are unrelated to any beliefs that could justify them. Then, … they frequently go further and even deny that they believe in the effectiveness of the acts that they perform.

In line with this, Rozin and Nemeroff note that verbal reports of participants in their experiment who refuse to drink water labelled as ‘Poison’ make clear that they are ‘acutely aware that this “makes no sense”, and yet acknowledge their feeling of aversion’ (2002: 202). A similar point is made by Shafir and Tversky (1992: 463–64) and Vyse (2017: 113–14).

Jane Risen has offered what is arguably the most extensive treatment of this phenomenon. She overviews a variety of studies that describe it (Risen 2016) and provides evidence of its occurrence in experimental conditions – finding, for instance, that subjects who engage in superstitious behaviours like refusing to perform actions that supposedly ‘tempt fate’ report believing that such behaviours do not make sense, and yet having the ‘gut feeling’ or ‘intuition’ that they are effective for avoiding bad luck (Risen and Gilovich 2008, Walco and Risen 2017).

To explain this paradoxical feature of superstitious cognition, Risen argues that we should revise standard psychological models that conflate error-detection with error-correction and recognize the psychological reality of what she calls ‘acquiescence’: a process by which ideas that are explicitly understood to be false or ungrounded are nonetheless endorsed and allowed to play action-guiding roles. ‘We detect an error, but choose not to correct it … and follow it nevertheless’ (Risen 2016: 182).

In describing acquiescence, Risen uses doxastic terminology – talking of ‘beliefs [that] are maintained even when people know they are not true’ (2016: 195). But what she says about the phenomenon speaks for its non-doxastic nature. For one thing, acquiescence is characterized as a ‘choice’ to let certain ideas stand, while belief is normally taken not to be under voluntary control.⁵ Moreover, and most importantly, ideas that we ‘let stand’ in acquiescence are openly recognized to be in conflict with the evidence and reasons that ground our beliefs, and, as we have seen, these consciously apparent contradictions are in tension with belief status – while they are standard in the domain of imagination.⁶

This is why what Risen describes as cases in which we ‘acquiesce’ to superstitious beliefs are better understood as cases in which superstitions are actually imaginings. This is in line with how the other psychologists just mentioned describe the cases in question: as cases in which people ‘act as if they erroneously believe … even though they do not really hold that belief’ (Scheifer and Tversky 1992: 464; see also Campbell 1996).

But when one acts as if a certain content p is the case, while not believing that p, one must nonetheless represent p in some way. In the case of superstitious contents, the relevant representations are imaginative in nature. When we engage with lucky charms and propitiatory rituals while not believing the relevant superstitions concerning those actions, we entertain such superstitions in our imagination.

If this is true for ‘proper’ superstitious thoughts, it is arguably also true for other cases in my category of superstitious–magical thinking for which we are not even tempted to suggest fully fledged doxastic explanations, and imagination is the natural alternative. When we talk to the door as if we believe that it can understand us, or we kiss a picture of our beloved as if we believe that we are kissing him, but without actually believing those contents, we imagine them instead (Velleman 2000: 269–71).

One here might object to the idea that, once we reject belief accounts of superstitious–magical thinking, imagination is the best alternative candidate, suggesting that we appeal instead to ‘novel’ mental states such as ‘aliefs’ (Gendler 2008). However, a widely accepted parsimony principle recommends that we avoid postulating novel mental categories if already familiar ones can play the relevant role (Levy 2016, Sullivan-Bissett 2018). And in this section I have argued that the functional profile of superstitious–magical attitudes neatly matches that of paradigmatic imaginings. Given that independent reasons to accept the existence of ‘aliefs’ are highly questionable (Currie and Ichino 2012), superstitious–magical actions as such do not seem to justify an appeal to such novel mental category.

4. Superstitious–magical imaginings directly motivate action

Recognizing that superstitious–magical thoughts are imaginings and not beliefs is not tantamount to recognizing that superstitious actions are directly motivated by such imaginings.

Consider the view known as ‘ritual instrumentalism’, according to which ‘people may engage in superstitious action because it feels good to take action, while at the same time refusing to commit themselves to the belief that such acts will achieve the desired result’ (Risen 2016: 1993). If this view is correct, it may be true that we typically just imagine the contents of our superstitions; however, what motivates us to act are not our imaginings themselves but rather our beliefs about the emotional benefits of acting in accordance with such imaginings. Let us call this the

This account may work for some cases of superstitious–magical actions. But it is implausible for the majority of them, because in many cases of superstitious action the relevant motivating desire is not a generic desire for positive emotions, but rather a goal-specific desire concerning the activities in which subjects are engaged.

This is indeed a point of agreement between the Imagination Account and the Belief Account: my strongest occurrent desire when I am sitting the exam and I take out my ‘wise pen’ is not a generic desire to feel good but the desire to do well in the exam – and this is what motivates me. So when I cross my fingers for you on your important day my motivating desire is not a generic desire to feel good, but the wish that I could actually do something to help you.

That agents in these cases hold goal-specific desires like those just mentioned is beyond doubt. Those desires are also manifested in their other non-superstitious actions and reactions (for instance, my desire to do well in the exam is also manifested in my last-minute reviews of the exam material). And indeed the holding of those desires is presupposed also by the Indirect Imagination Account: it is precisely because I desire to do well in the exam that the mere fact of imagining that my ‘wise pen’ will help me makes me feel better.

Of course, advocates of the Indirect Imagination Account may grant this but still insist that those goal-specific desires co-exist with the desires for positive emotions that we all have, and these latter desires are those that we seek to satisfy when we engage in superstitious actions. But this explanation would fail to capture something important about superstitious cognition and agency.

One widely shared idea in superstition research, as we have seen, is that superstition typically arises in conditions of stress and uncertainty in which the achievement of some important goal feels beyond our reach. Superstition is a way to restore a feeling of control over such goals – providing the so-called ‘illusion of control’ (Langer 1975, Vyse 2014: 152–53, Risen 2016). This suggests that a basic driver of superstitious actions is the pursuit of the goals in question. Since we believe that there is not much we can do (or much else, beyond what we already did) to reach such goals, what superstitions do for us is to provide alternative, imaginative ways to do that – and this is what moves us to act accordingly. I really want to do well in the exam, but I know that all that I have done (or can do) is not enough for that – so I imagine that using this pen can help, and this is why I perform that action.

Explanations of this sort also seem right for the other sui generis instances of superstitious–magical actions I introduced. When I ask the door to please remain shut, arguably I really want it to stay shut, and I imagine that if I ask it gently, I might persuade it to do that. When I kiss the picture of my beloved, I really want to kiss him and I imagine that kissing the picture is a way to do that. And so on.

Again, I do not deny that the Indirect Imagination Account may have a story to tell about these actions. We could say that, for example, I talk to the door because I want to vent my irritation for its annoying broken handle and I believe that talking to it will help to do that. However, even granting that I actually hold a belief–desire pair like this, these are not likely to be the states that most directly motivate me. When I struggle with that broken handle, my strongest desire is to keep the door shut. This desire is also manifested in my realistically purposeful actions, such as pushing the door hard with both hands. Besides – given that such actions do not prove fully effective – it motivates actions that are just imaginative ways to fulfil it: since what I believe to be effective ways to keep the door shut do not work, I imagine some other ways to make that happen and I act upon such imaginings.

5. Conclusion

According to a once-standard view, imagination has little or even no role in action guidance: its motivating power, if any, is limited to contexts of pretence (and possibly of psychopathology – see Currie and Ravenscroft 2002: Part III, Nichols and Stich 2000).

In recent years this view has been challenged by accounts that assign imagination a key cognitive and motivating role in various other domains, including self-deception (Gendler 2007), implicit bias (Sullivan-Bissett 2018), religious cognition (van Leeuwen 2014, 2023, Ichino 2023) and conspiracy theorizing (Ichino 2022, Munro 2023).

I have argued that imagination also plays a motivating role in another domain: superstitious–magical thinking. While, as I noted, this thinking shares some surface features with religious and conspiracy-related thinking, the mechanisms that underlie it have peculiarities that make it even better suited to be understood in imaginative terms: most notably the characteristic ‘acquiescence’ by virtue of which superstitious–magical thoughts are entertained despite explicit awareness of their groundlessness. Superstitious–magical thoughts are often held by subjects who do not take themselves to believe them and possibly even acknowledge their imaginative nature. This is why the imagination account of superstitious–magical actions that I defended here may also be accepted by those who are as yet unconvinced by imagination accounts of other sorts of actions. For those who are already convinced by those accounts, it adds one more piece to the big picture of imagination’s role in thought and action.

It is an important piece, since superstitious–magical cognition as I defined it is pervasive. Recognizing its imaginative nature means recognizing how ubiquitous imaginative representations are in our mental lives, and the fact that their role in guiding action is not circumscribed to specific contexts – like pretence or the ‘religious practical setting’ (van Leeuwen 2014, 2023: 80–81). Our thinking is permeated by imaginative superstitious–magical elements that motivate actions in all sorts of circumstances.⁷

Funding

This work was supported by the PRIN Project Conceptual Negotiation for a Better Future: An Ethical and Conceptual Investigation (PRIN2022PNRR - P20225A73K_003).

References

Footnotes