Magical Thinking - Associative Thinking

Associative Thinking

Prominent Victorian theorists identified "associative thinking," (a common feature of practitioners of magic) as a characteristic form of irrationality. As with all forms of magical thinking, association-based and similarity-based notions of causality need not involve the practice of magic by a magician. For example, the doctrine of signatures held that similarity between plant parts and body parts indicated their efficacy in treating diseases of those body parts, and was a part of Western medicine. This association-based thinking is a vivid example of the general human application of the representativeness heuristic.

Edward Burnett Tylor coined the term "associative thinking", characterizing it as pre-logical, in which the "magician's folly" is in mistaking an ideal connection with a real one. The magician believes that thematically-linked items can influence one another by virtue of their similarity. For example, in E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s account, amongst the Azande tribe members rub crocodile teeth on banana plants to invoke a fruitful crop. Because crocodile teeth are curved (like bananas) and grow back if they fall out, the Azande observe this similarity and want to impart this capacity of regeneration to their bananas. To them, the rubbing constitutes a means of transference.

Sir James Frazer later elaborated upon this principle by dividing magic into the categories of "contagious" and "homeopathic" magic, both of which are forms of "sympathetic" magic. The former is based upon the law of contagion or contact, in which two things that were once connected retain this link and have the ability to affect their supposedly related objects, such as harming a person by harming a lock of his hair. Homeopathic magic operates upon the premise that "like affects like", or that one can impart characteristics of one similar object to another. Frazer believed that these individuals think the entire world functions according to these mimetic, or homeopathic, principles.

In How Natives Think (1925), Lucien Lévy-Bruhl describes a similar notion of mystical, "collective representations". He too sees magical thinking as fundamentally different from a Western style of thought. He asserts that in these representations, 'primitive' people's "mental activity is too little differentiated for it to be possible to consider ideas or images of objects by themselves apart from the emotions and passions which evoke those ideas or are evoked by them." Lévy-Bruhl explains that natives commit the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, in which people observe that x is followed by y, therefore y has been caused by x. He believes that this fallacy is institutionalized in native culture and is committed regularly and repeatedly.

Despite the view that magic is less than rational and entails an inferior concept of causality, in The Savage Mind (1966), Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested that magical procedures are relatively effective in exerting control over the environment. This outlook has generated alternative theories of magical thinking, such as the symbolic and psychological approaches, and softened the contrast between "educated" and "primitive" thinking: "Magical thinking is no less characteristic of our own mundane intellectual activity than it is of Zande curing practices."