The affect heuristic

Traditionally, research on superstition and magical thinking has focused on people's cognitive shortcomings, but superstitions are not limited to individuals with mental deficits. Even smart, educated, emotionally stable adults have superstitions that are not rational. Dual process models--such as the corrective model advocated by Kahneman and Frederick (2002, 2005), which suggests that System 1 generates intuitive answers that may or may not be corrected by System 2--are useful for illustrating why superstitious thinking is widespread, why particular beliefs arise, and why they are maintained even though they are not true. However, to understand why superstitious beliefs are maintained even when people know they are not true requires that the model be refined. It must allow for the possibility that people can recognize--in the moment--that their belief does not make sense, but act on it nevertheless. People can detect an error, but choose not to correct it, a process I refer to as acquiescence. The first part of the article will use a dual process model to understand the psychology underlying magical thinking, highlighting features of System 1 that generate magical intuitions and features of the person or situation that prompt System 2 to correct them. The second part of the article will suggest that we can improve the model by decoupling the detection of errors from their correction and recognizing acquiescence as a possible System 2 response. I suggest that refining the theory will prove useful for understanding phenomena outside of the context of magical thinking.

Believing what we do not believe: Acquiescence to superstitious beliefs and other powerful intuitions.

There is a worldwide and increasing shortage of potable fresh water. Modern water reclamation technologies can alleviate much of the problem by converting wastewater directly into drinking water, but there is public resistance to these approaches that has its basis largely in psychology. A psychological problem is encapsulated in the saying of those opposing recycled water: “toilet to tap.” We report the results of two surveys, one on a sample of over 2,000 Americans from five metropolitan areas and the second on a smaller sample of American undergraduates, both assessing attitudes to water and water purification. Approximately 13% of our adult American sample definitely refuses to try recycled water, while 49% are willing to try it, with 38% uncertain. Both disgust and contamination sensitivity predict resistance to consumption of recycled water. For a minority of individuals, no overt treatment of wastewater will make it acceptable for drinking (“spiritual contagion”), even if the resultant water is purer than drinking or bottled water. Tap water is reliably rated as significantly more desirable than wastewater that has undergone substantially greater purification than occurs with normal tap water. Framing and contagion are two basic psychological processes that influence recycled water rejection.

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Psychological aspects of the rejection of recycled water: Contamination, purification and disgust.

Over 20 years have passed since magical contagion was first introduced to psychology; we discuss how psychological and consumer behavior findings since then have deepened our understanding of this phenomenon. Recent research has shed light on the psychological mechanisms that underlie consumers’ contamination concerns (e.g., the behavioral immune system, disgust), confirming that people’s germ-related intuitions affect a wide variety of consumer judgments in areas that are only indirectly linked to disease-related threats (used products, [un]]familiar products, products contacting each other). Moreover, recent findings have also documented the ways that nonphysical essences might transfer from people to objects (celebrity products; positive consumer contagion). This recent body of work extends contagion research by demonstrating that physical contact is not a prerequisite for essence transfer and that the types of essences that are contagious are broader than originally conceived. We close by disc...

Catching (Up with) Magical Contagion: A Review of Contagion Effects in Consumer Contexts

Exile in America: Political Expulsion and the Limits of Liberal Government

Most American respondents give “irrational,” magical responses in a variety of situations that exemplify the sympathetic magical laws of similarity and contagion. In most of these cases, respondents are aware that their responses (usually rejections, as of fudge crafted to look like dog feces, or a food touched by a sterilized, dead cockroach) are not “scientifically” justified, but they are willing to avow them. We interpret this, in some sense, as “heart over head.” We report in this study that American adults and undergraduates are substantially less likely to acknowledge magical effects when the judgments involve money (amount willing to pay to avoid an “unpleasant” magical contact) than they are when using preference or rating measures. We conclude that in “head-heart” conflicts of this type, money tips the balance towards the former, or, in other words, that money makes the mind less magical.

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Heidi Grant

Papers

"Head versus heart": Effect of monetary frames on expression of sympathetic magical concerns