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Likeness and Likelihood in Everyday Thought: Magical Thinking in Judgments About Personality [And Comments and Reply] Likeness and Likelihood in Everyday Thought: Magical Thinking in Judgments About Personality [and Comments and Reply] Richard A. Shweder; Joseph B. Casagrande; Donald W. Fiske; J. David Greenstone; Paul Heelas; Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition; David F. Lancy Current Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 4. (Dec., 1977), pp. 637-658. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0011-3204%28197712%2918%3A4%3C637%3ALALIET%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G Current Anthropology is currently published by The University of Chicago Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/ucpress.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Wed Aug 15 22:58:42 2007 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Vo1. 18, NO. 4, December 1977 @ 1977 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Likeness and Likelihood in Everyday Thought: Magical Thinking in Judgments about Personality' by Richard A. Shweder This paper is dedicated to tlze little boy who tried to prove that spiders to cure epilepsy by eating the burnt skull of a red bush monkey hear with their legs. A$er cutting off a spider's legs, he yelled, "Jump!" or their therapeutic application of fowl's excrement in cases The spider did not jump. So the little boy said, "You see, I was right. of ringworm (see Evans-Pritchard 1937, Tambiah 1973)? A Spiders hear with their legs." line of research conducted by Newcomb (1929), D'Andrade (1965, 1973, 1974), Chapman and Chapman (1967, 1969), Tver- INWHAT TERMS SHOULD WE UNDERSTAND the understandings of sky and Kahneman (1973, 1974), and Shweder (1972b, 1975a, other peoples and compare those understandings with our own? 1976a, n.d. a, b) suggests one possible answer to this question: Reflection on this central issue in the anthropology of thought that the distinction between likeness and co-occurrence likeli- raises the perplexing secondary question, What are we to make hood (contingency) is collapsed in everyday thought. of another culture's apparently false knowledge? For example, The absence of a distinction between resemblance and con- how is the student of the Azande to comprehend their attempts tingency is familiar to anthropological fieldworkers. It is char- The work of Roy G. D'Andrade and Theodore M. Newcomb has acteristic of magical thought. Evans-Pritchard (1937:487), for been an inspiration in the development of the hypothesis advanced in example, notes: this paper. Without implicating them in my particular perspective on the relationship between symbolic systems and intellectual pro- Generally the logic of therapeutic treatment consists in the selection cesses, I would like to thank them for their scholarship and their en- of the most prominent external symptoms, the naming of the disease couragement. I am also grateful to Donald W. Fiske and J. David after some object in nature it resembles [e.g., the physical movements Greenstone for their penetrating comments on an earlier version of of bush monkeys resemble epileptic seizures; ringworm resembles fowl this paper. The financial support of the Spencer Foundation and the excrement] and the utilization of the object as the principal ingredient National Institute of Mental Health is much appreciated. in the drug administered to cure the disease. The circle may even be completed by belief that the external symptoms not only yield to treatment by the object which resembles them but are caused by it RICHARDA. SHWEDERis Assistant Professor of Human Develop- as well. ment, Committee on Human Development, Department of Be- havioral Sciences, University of Chicago (Chicago, Ill. 60637, The existence of magical thought systems has posed a difficult U.S.A.). Born in 1945, he was educated at Harvard University interpretive problem for anthropological theory. Some scholars (Ph.D., 1972). He has been a research associate of the Department (e.g., LCvi-Strauss 1966) have viewed magic as a relatively effec- of Anthropology of Utkal University, Bhubaneswar, India; a re- tive set of procedures for acquiring knowledge and exercising search fellow of the Department of Psychology and Social Rela- tions, Harvard University; a fellow of the Child Development control over one's environment, comparable to scientific canons Research Unit, University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya; and a lec- of enquiry. Others (e.g., Malinowski 1954) have viewed it as turer in the Department of Sociology of the latter university. His analogous to wish-fulfillment, an irrational symbolic attempt research interests include cross-cultural developmental and experi- mental investigations of modes of thought; cultural schemata and to influence uncontrollable events. Still others (e.g., Tambiah their influence on learning, memory, and judgment; the limits 1973) have viewed it as a form of rhetoric, designed to arouse of rational adaptive behavior; the anthropology of thought; and sentiments rather than make truth claims about what goes with comparative child development. Among his publications are "As- what in experience. I shall present an alternative perspective, pects of Cognition in Zinacanteco Shamans: Experimental Re- sults," in Reader in Comparative Religion, edited by William Lessa zrguing that magical thinking is an expression of a universal and Evon Z. Vogt (3d edition, New York: Harper and Row, 1972); disinclination of normal adults to draw correlational lessons "The Between and Within of Cross-Cultural Research" (Ethos from their experience, coupled with a universal inclination to 1531-43); with R. Levine, "Dream Concepts of Hausa Children: seek symbolic and meaningful connections (likenesses) among A Critique of the 'Doctrine of Invariant Sequence' in Cognitive Development" (Ethos 3:209-30); "How Relevant is an Individual objects and events. Magical thinking is no less characteristic of Difference Theory of Personality?" (Journal of Personality 43 : our own mundane intellectual activities than it is of Zande cur- 455-84); and "Illusory Correlation and the M.M.P.I. Contro- ing practices. versy," with commentary by Jack Block and Allen Edwards Magical thinking is an expression of a cognitive-processing (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, in press). limitation of the human mind. It is that form of noncorrelation- The present paper, submitted in final form 27 I 77, was sent for comment to 50 scholars. The responses are printed below and are a1 reasoning utilized when objects and events conceptually (or followed by a reply by the author. semantically) affiliate or exclude one another in our minds. Vol. 18 . No. 4 . December 1977 Typically, it involves a confusion of propositions about the velopmental psychologists such as Price-Williams (1969) have world with propositions about language (D'Andrade 1965).2 alerted us to the relative ease with which children in all cul- Correlation and contingency are relatively complex concepts tures come to have such concepts as object constancy and re- that are not spontaneously available to human thought (see, versibility (see Piaget 1953, 1967). It seems safe to conclude e.g., Smedslund 1963, Jenkins and Ward 1965, Ward and Jen- that normal adults in all cultures act on the implicit understand- kins 1965, Shweder 1976~).Correlation-relevant information is ing that the external world has an independent existence. They difficult for the human mind to organize into a format that have the concept of object constancy; they make plans, nego- lends itself to correlational manipulation, and correlational tiate agreements, predict events, etc. It also seems safe to con- reasoning is typically avoided when most adults in all cultures clude that normal adults in all cultures act on the implicit un- estimate what goes with what in their experience. (Using Pia- derstanding that for any event there is an intellectual operation get's terminology, we might hypothesize that most adults in all that compensates for it, cancels it, or undoes it. They have the cultures are not formal operational thinkers. Correlation and concept of reversibility, e.g., breaches of social expectation are contingency are formal operational concepts; see, e.g., Inhelder followed by excuses, verbal stratagems designed to reverse and and Piaget [1958].) Instead, most normal adults do as the undo the distress caused by misconduct, Normal adults in all Azande do. They rely on likeness to estimate co-occurrence like- cultures easily master the intellectual manipulations charac- lihood (see, e.g., D'Andrade 1965, 1973, 1974; Chapman 1967; teristic of concrete operational thought (as discussed by Piaget, Chapman and Chapman 1967, 1969; Tversky and Kahneman e.g., 1967).3 1973, 1974; Shweder 1972b, 1975a, 1976a, n.d. a, b). The anthropological literature on the kinds of relationships I shall examine this cognitive-processing perspective on magi- expressed in folk definitions (e.g., Casagrande and Hale 1967, cal thinking by focusing upon everyday personality judgments. Tyler 1969) provides us with other examples of relatively intu- I shall show that the distinction between conceptual affiliation itive concepts.
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