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Paper short abstract:

Magical thinking has mostly been considered as primitive or rationally low. However, current evidence in cognitive science proposes that magical thinking has not gone anywhere in modernization. The present paper discusses how magical thinking of historical people was rather similar as it is today.

Paper long abstract:

For centuries, magical thinking has been considered as primitive, rationally low, or something that occurs in the other cultures but not in one’s own. Since the time of the Victorian era anthropologists Edward B. Tylor and James Frazer, magical thinking has also been considered as something completely other than science or modern thinking. Because of these pejorative connotations, researchers of the 21st century have faced certain ethical challenges in studying magic of historical or non-Western cultures. How to resign from these pejorative connotations?

This paper presents a socio-cognitive perspective in studying magic of “the other” cultures. Current evidence in cognitive science, psychology and behavioural studies proposes that magical thinking derives from the basic mental processes of the human mind, and that magical thinking is relatively common within modern, Western people as well (see, e.g., Rozin & Nemeroff 2000; Lindeman & Aarnio 2007; Vyse 2013). Magical thinking has been with us all along, and it is not just a phenomenon of "the others".

The paper presents a case study in which the studies of cognitive science are combined with folklore studies considering magical healing in pre-industrial Finland and Karelia. This cross-disciplinary study proposes that these historical people were not actually that different from contemporary Westerns but, on the contrary, their magical thinking was rather similar as magical thinking of, for instance, Western college students in the 21st century.