Games with the Supernatural: Magical Reality in the Everyday Life / Игры со сверхъестественным: Магическая реальность в обыденной жизни

Субботский Евгений Васильевич доктор психологических наук . CR0 2GG, Великобритания, London область, г. Croydon, ул. Saffron Square, 11 Subbotsky Eugene Doctor of Psychology Professor, the department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Great Britain CR0 2GG, Velikobritaniya, London oblast', g. Croydon, ul. Saffron Square, 11 subbotsky@me.com Другие публикации этого автора

All, all that threatens to destroy

Fills mortal hearts with secret joy

Alexander Pushkin “A Feast During the Plague” (Translated by Nancy K. Anderson ^[1])

One of the functions of children's role play is overcoming the inferiority complex: In play, children temporarily forget that they are small and weak, and get the opportunity to rebuild the world as they please by affecting people and objects in a magical way. The computer game «minecraft» can be an example. By immersing themselves into the game, children obtain powers which are truly magical: With a motion of a finger they can create cars, spaceships, gardens, palaces and the whole cities, both on land and underground. In endless labyrinths of underground tunnels the children can travel, chase and kill bad guys or hide themselves from monsters. All is accompanied by nice music, all is full of bright colours and shades of grey. Pulling the children out of this magical world and back into the real world where every achievement costs and the children have to obey rules and make efforts can bring disappointment to the children. Quite understandably, the children resist.

As a result, there appeared a new psychological phenomenon: The addiction to the magical reality of computer games. In some respects, this addiction is similar to the addiction to psychedelic drugs. In the altered state of mind caused by LSD a person can get the intensive experience of freshness of the world and oneness with the surrounding objects. While playing the game of minecraft children may have similar experiences. It is quite possible that in this state of consciousness the children can learn and remember new ideas better than in the normal state of mind. But the addiction to magical reality is also potentially dangerous. We don't know yet whether this addiction doesn't cause some delicate changes to the brain chemistry and what the long-term consequences of this addiction are. But one thing is clear: In children's lives there appeared a new and unexplored activity that can plunge children into the depths of magical reality faster and more effectively than the traditional ways of playing with magic – fairy tales and pretend games.

Playing with computer generated magical reality is just one type of games with magical reality. Intentionally or unintentionally, in modern industrial cultures people play a variety of games with magical reality on a regular basis. On what domains of modern life does magical reality trespass? What motivates people, who live in the world designed by science, to play with magical reality? What psychological consequences can the involvement with magical reality entail? These and other issues I would like to discuss in this paper.

Magical reality, which in this paper I will refer to as Wonderland, is similar to geometry on a sphere. In such geometry the postulates of Euclid geometry are suspended: Parallel lines can cross and the sum of the angles of a triangle can be more than 180 degrees ^[2]. Likewise, in Wonderland the known laws of logic and nature can be violated: A part of a whole can be equal to the whole, a statement can be both true and false, time can go backwards, horses can have wings and fly, people can get to other universes and little children can solve advanced problems of high math. But Wonderland is not the land of chaos; it has laws of its own. One of these laws is the “thought and matter equivalence”: In Wonderland a thought can instantly come true. In the everyday reality, if we decided to build a house we have to get some bricks and other construction materials, make a plan, lay down a foundation and do many other things before the house can take its physical form. By contrast, in the supernatural reality of Wonderland we can build a palace by saying a magic spell and wishing the palace to appear. Of course, we need to know the magic words or get help from a magical creature. Another law of Wonderland is «participation». According to this law, two objects that are physically unrelated one to the other can have a magical bond between themselves, which lasts forever and acts instantly on a distance. For example, a person's image (e.g., a photo) or the person’s part (e.g., a bunch of the person's hair or a piece of his or her cloths) is viewed as magically connected to the person himself or herself. If a wizard casts a magic spell and burns the piece of cloths of the person to whom the wizards intends to inflict harm, then the target person is supposed to get ill or even die. It is easy to see that “thought and matter equivalence” and “participation” are interconnected, because thought and matter equivalence essentially is participation between a thought and the thought's physical embodiment.

Sometimes we get into Wonderland in our dreams. Indeed, in dreams we can see our deceased relatives, speak with animals and fly in the air like birds. But many of us like to play with the supernatural in the waking state of mind as well. We enjoy watching films with magical content (e.g., «The Lord of the Rings» or «Harry Potter» series), reading books that depict magical events (e.g., «Master and Margarita» by Mikhail Bulgakov), and looking at art objects with include magical characters (e.g., paintings by Dali, Picasso or Magritte). The name for this kind of games with the supernatural is magical thinking. Because magical thinking unfolds within the domain of imagination, it peacefully coexists with our belief in science. But one thing is imaginary play with the supernatural, and quite another – believing that supernatural events and characters really do exist. In the Western world today most people view the belief in Wonderland to be a remnant of ancient history; in a popular view, only small children and a limited number of superstitious adults take magic seriously.

However, psychological studies of the recent decades have shown that deep in the subconscious educated adults still believe in the supernatural ^[3][4]. For example, according to the law of participation, a warrior’s weapon is magically linked to its owner and can pass the owner’s power and military skills to another person who took possession of the weapon. An example can be found in Russian folklore, where a sword, which belonged to a great warrior, keeps the warrior's power even after the warrior's death and can pass this power to a new owner. With the aim of examining whether this law works in the mind of modern educated adults, in a recent study participants (university undergraduates) were given a golf putter and told that the golf putter had earlier been used by a professional golfer ^[5]. The results indicated that these participants not only were more successful at putting the ball into the golf hole than the participants who had been told that their putter had just been purchased in a store, but they also perceived the size of the golf hole to be larger. This showed that the belief in that a tool can magically transfer the skill of its owner to another person is indeed present in the minds of modern adults; more important, this belief works by facilitating the performance of those who think that their tool earlier belonged to a person who used this tool successfully. In another study participants (university graduates and undergraduates) were asked to imagine that a professional witch was going to put a magic spell on their future lives with the aim of either making them rich and happy or putting them in service to the dark forces. Although the participants verbally denied that the spell might have any effect on their future lives, they behaved as if they indeed believed in the power of the magic spell ^[6]. However, the belief in magic worked only in the condition where the magic spell intended to change the participants' own lives; by contrast, if the spell aimed to affect the life of a stranger, the participants did not show the belief in the spell's magical powers. Another experiment showed that participants believed in the magical powers of a psychology experimenter to the same extent they believed in the magical powers of a professional witch ^[7].

Altogether, experiments revealed that most educated adults deny that they believe in magic, yet in some conditions they behave as if they really believed in the supernatural. Interestingly, people can attribute magical powers not only to professional witches, but also to other influential individuals, such as scientists, politicians, and medical doctors. This subconscious belief of modern people in magic opens the opportunity of manipulating the people's minds, with the aim of extracting political, social and economic gains. Let us consider how manipulating mass consciousness based on people's magical beliefs works in some domains of modern life.

The popular sentiment «free cheese exists only in a mousetrap» is not a joke but a law of economics, as unbreakable as the law of gravity in physics. Whatever nooks and crannies of Wonderland modern virtual realities bring us to, one thing stays unchanged – the “exchange principle”. One can ride a broomstick, be invisible, travel back and forth in time, turn people into stone, but one cannot get anything from another person without giving the person something in return, even if this something is the person's own life (exchange through violence) or the feeling of moral satisfaction (exchange by exploiting the feeling of compassion and altruism). Still, just like in dreams we sometimes cheat the law of gravitation, it seems to us that we can cheat the law of the «free cheese in a mousetrap».

Every year people get dozens of offers from companies: Buy our goods and your name will be put in a lottery where you can win thousands of pounds. I used to trash such offers but once decided to give it a go – just to see what would come out of this. Coincidentally, the choice of goods was not too bad. I purchased three small but useful objects and began to wait for a lottery win. Of course, I won nothing, but the offers from the same company kept coming, accompanied with the same catalogue. The only small variation happened when the offer came for the forth time; along with the catalogue of goods for sale and a standard set of papers to complete a small poster came with my name and the company's gold medal shown on it. The instruction said «Proudly put on the wall» - a small carrot in the expectation that the suggestion would work again. It reminded me Pinocchio kids story. The marvellous but naive puppet boy named Pinocchio listened to the crooked cat and fox and planted his coins in the Miracle Meadow, hoping that the tree would soon grow dripping with gold coins. Many people in the 1990-th Russia, including scientists with PhD titles, lost their savings in treacherous financial pyramids, which promised unrealistically high rates of capital growth. What does this fact prove? A simple truth: Science education cannot protect a person from deception, which targets the person’s belief in financial magic of Wonderland.

Recall that according to the law of participation things that resemble each other are magically linked one to the other. For example, the rhinoceros horn looks like a penis and is used in some cultures as aphrodisiac. In 2002 American psychologist Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prise for the studies of cognitive biases in economics ^[7]. One of such biases is the anchoring effect. The effect describes the common human tendency, when solving economic tasks, to rely on information that becomes a frame of reference despite it has no a rational connection with the tasks' essence. For example, if a person is asked to select a two digits number from a pool of numbers and then estimate the approximate cost of various goods (e.g., a brand of wine, a chocolate bar or a computer), then the person who had chosen a larger digit number would estimate the cost at a higher amount of money then the person who had chosen a smaller digit number ^[8]. Why do people do this? Because unconsciously they follow the law of participation, according to which things can only generate things that are similar to them. If a person selected number 11 then in the person's mind a bottle of wine simply can't cost 50 pounds, but if the person selected number 60 then it can. That is why it's easier for manufacturers to sell a dress which costs 160 pounds if the dress is labelled as having gone down in price from 200 to 160 than if the label only shows the real price of 160.

Another form the law of participation takes is «contamination» - a transfer of properties of an object to another object that used to be in close contact with the former object. For example, people were more prone to wear a washed and disinfected sweater that had been earlier worn by a good person than the sweater that had been worn by a bad person ^[9]. In his book about the financial crash of the 1929 ^[10] American economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted that during the crisis American president Hoover deliberately employed the law of contamination to elevate the spirit of the population, by practicing meetings that had no practical significance. He invited to the White House various VIP's (e.g., governors of the states, manufacturers, trade union leaders, businessmen, politicians etc.) who discussed issues of no significant value. Nevertheless, in the eyes of general public the impression was building up that some important activity was going on, because the importance of persons involved in these meetings was transferred to the meetings themselves.

In the same book Galbraith maintains that in the moments of crises and those closely preceding crises the influence of the “economics’ guru” – the authorities in business – on the rise or fall of share prices rapidly grows. For instance, when director of “General Motors” John Rascob, while departing from USA to Europe in 1928, predicted the rise of General Motors’ share prices in the nearest few days, the share prices of this and other companies indeed went up sharply the next day. In March 1929 a single optimistic prediction of the director of “National City Bank” John Mitchell helped to inhibit the fall of share prices. What affect the market are not rational calculations but the public belief in special abilities of prominent financiers. Science based predictions of Harvard University professors of economics had a smaller effect on public than arbitrary declarations of big figures in business. Interestingly, as the crisis deepened in the following years nobody accused the business bosses of wrongly optimistic predictions, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of people loosing their fortunes, but the Harvard professors’ reputation was irreversibly damaged.

Galbraith himself suffered from financial Wonderland. He published his book on the 1929 financial crash in 1955. When somewhat later that year the financial market collapsed again, some members of the public accused Galbraith’s book of this. Galbraith started to get letters with threats of physical violence and promises of praying for his early death and health deterioration. About that time Galbraith had a skiing accident and broke his leg; some of the accusers took this event as the proof of effectiveness of their prayers. The “thought and matter equivalence” magical law of Wonderland worked out with the perseverance of a machine.

The laws of Wonderland are particularly influential in the area of advertising. Studies have shown that placement of commercial products within films positively affects the viewers’ ability to memorise these products; if a movie character personally uses a product (for example, pours Evian water into a plate in order to give it to a dog), then this increases the viewers’ general positive attitude towards that product ^[11]. But why do people develop a more positive attitude toward the product used by the movie character than to other similar products placed in the context of the same movie? Because the movie star touches the product, and the people want to be as beautiful and famous as the movie star. The law of participation is at work here: An object that was in physical contact with a celebrity magically absorbs the qualities of the celebrity, becomes “contaminated” with these qualities. Subconsciously the viewers hope that if they use the same product (e.g., Evian water), then some of these qualities will pass to them.

The magic of numbers ascends to Pythagoras (570-490 BC) but it also works today. Among magical numbers number three is perhaps the most popular one: Remember the three piglets of the popular children’s tale, the three musketeers, and the three magical cards. A recent study conducted by psychologists of Georgetown and Californian universities has shown that advertising is affected by the magical influence of number three. If you want a product you advertise to be taken favourably by potential consumers you need to name three positive qualities of the product, and it is irrelevant if the advertised product is a flask of shampoo, a hotel or a presidential candidate ^[12]. But if you try too hard and name four or more positive qualities – the magic disappears and the advertised product loses its charm in the eyes of consumers. Do you want to positively present a man? “Handsome, intelligent and nice” would do the job, but “handsome, intelligent, nice and a good sportsman” would be too many. Why? As the authors of this study believe, three positive features are perceived by people with trust, but add one or two more and the people start feeling that they are being fooled and pushed to buy a second sort. But why do people trust to only three adjectives? Could it not be because the number three comes from Wonderland and is a magical number? Beside its unique mathematical properties, number three is basic in many world religions, such as Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and Wiccan. In Chinese and Vietnamese mythology number three is a lucky number ^[13]. Guided by the magical law of participation, people transfer their trust toward number three to the product that has three positive adjectives.

Many people who watch a TV hate commercial advertising that interrupts a program every 15 minutes. But if you look into advertisement clips more closely you might notice that some of them involve good knowledge of human psychology. I was always interested in watching advertisements with magical effects, which violate laws of physics, biology and psychology. Now a chocolate bar is transformed into a small human figure, which is dancing and speaking, now a moving car turns into a running jaguar, now human infants perform athletic feats that can only be done by Olympic champions, animals speak human languages, horses fly in the air, and so on. Why do advertising companies need such effects, which are cognitively complex and probably expensive to make? Do they assume that the magic clad products are remembered better and liked more by potential consumers than the products placed in a nonmagical context? In order to examine this assumption, my students and I composed two films out of advertising clips. One of the films incorporated commercial brands placed in the context of magical effects, and the other had the same or similar brands put in the context of equally interesting and exciting but non-magical effects. It turned out that the brands placed within the magical context indeed were better recognised by the viewers in the subsequent test than the brands placed within the non-magical context ^[14]. Interestingly, in some participants this memory facilitation effect showed up not immediately after the films demonstration but two weeks later. It looks like with time commercial brands placed within the non-magical context are ousted from the viewers' memory by new visual information, whereas brands associated with Wonderland by the law of participation resist this fading effect and remain in the viewers’ memory for a longer time.

Modern scientific medicine has been around for approximately 250 years, but how did people live without it in the earlier times? They believed in the healing powers of medicine men, shamans and priests, and this belief was sufficient for the healing effect to take place. This magical effect of a patient’s belief on his or her physical state is known as the placebo effect, and this effect is still used in medicine today. To achieve the placebo effect, a doctor gives a patient a capsule filled with distilled or slightly sweetened water and tells that this is the medicine for the patient’s illness. It turns out that the patient’s belief in that the doctor is telling the truth can be enough to produce some improvement in the patient’s condition ^[15]. Recent studies have shown that even when patients are told that the capsule they are given contains nothing but distilled water but taking the capsule can nevertheless help – the healing effect can still follow ^[16]. In other words, the single belief of the patient in the doctor’s healing powers makes the patient’s brain elicit substances (hormones and opiates) that can, albeit temporarily, reduce the intensity of pain and other symptoms. Of course, the placebo effect cannot cure serious illnesses, such as cancer and tuberculosis, but the fact remains that our thought alone can influence physiological processes in our bodies.

According to some data, up to 35% of medical doctors today occasionally use the placebo effect in their clinical work ^[17]. The advocates of magical healing methods widely employ the placebo effect as well. Paradoxically, in some cases magic does really work. However, unlike medical doctors, magical healers are not bound by the Hippocratic Oath “do no harm” and may use the placebo effect in circumstances where this effect is insufficient for cure (e.g., in cases such as cancer, Alzheimer and Parkinson diseases) and provokes unrealistic hopes in the patient; as a result, the patient may apply for medical treatment when it is too late.

Homeopathy is another baby of sympathetic magic. In accord with the magical law “an object’s image equals the object” homeopathic medicine relies on the principle that “similar should be treated with similar”. The idea is that the “medicine” should contain substance that causes symptoms similar to those caused by the illness, but in a very slight form. This medicine is dissolved in water or spirit, then some water is added and the solution is stirred, then the procedure of adding water and stirring is repeated up to 30 times. Homeopathic doctors believe that the resulting solution works better than those recommended by official medicine. The mechanism of the healing effect is that the water is “charged” by the energy of the original healing substance, plus the energy of the homeopathic doctors themselves. According to some data, in European countries up to 40% of practicing doctors employ some of homeopathic methods. Clearly, official medicine and chemistry can not account for the mechanisms of “charging” the water by the energy, but even if healing results of homeopathic medicine do not exceed the results of the placebo effect, homeopathic healing might still have some healing effect. It looks like the patients’ magical thinking contributes towards this healing effect. No wonder that in 1999 only in the USA a few million people attended homeopathic doctors ^[18].

In order to avoid lethal mistakes, in the XX century magical medicine started to present itself not as an alternative to scientific medicine but as a medicine that complements scientific medicine. Few people would argue against the idea that when a patient has terminal cancer and it is necessary to raise the patient’s spirit, then every method should be used, including the rituals of “protective magic” ^[19]. This is a no loose game: If the magical rituals don’t help, then they don’t do any harm either, but what if they do help?

It turned out that magical medicine could even be used to “cure the destiny”. Everyone knows that destiny can’t be changed. Yet recently Russian TV showed a program about a surgery in Japan in which a person’s destiny is corrected by carving new paths on the person’s palm. And the number of people who would like to “correct the fate” grows. Obviously, these people believe that lines on a person’s palm is the image that reflects the person’s fate laid down in Wonderland. Yet, speaking rationally, to believe that by changing the image one can change the original is the same as to believe that one can change a riverbed by altering the river’s track shown on a map. But rational logic doesn’t work in Wonderland. In Wonderland, causality works both ways: For those who believe that palm lines and fate are magically interconnected this single fact is sufficient for the hope that changing one of the pair may change the other. An interesting question to the believers could be: If an angel (or a demon) who lives in Wonderland changed our fate, would our palm lines change?

Imagine that in the known Biblical story god did not part the waves of the Red Sea in order to let Hebrew people cross the sea and avoid being reached by the pharaoh’s army; instead Moses taught the people to build large rafts and the people used the rafts to cross the sea. Imagine also that Jesus did not raise Lazarus from the dead; instead he cured a badly ill yet still living Lazarus. Would reducing miracles to a lower rank of rare yet possible events affect the image of political and religious leaders and diminish these leaders’ unconditional respect and authority among their peoples? It is quite likely that it would.

The question is therefore why gods are wizards and not just magnified copies of ordinary people. Who need gods to be wizards – gods or people? It looks like people need this more than gods. First, they need this in order to explain the unexplainable – the origins of the world and the human soul. But most important, people’s leaders need this in order to sanction their political and spiritual power. Indeed, in the animal kingdom a leader (e.g., alpha male) enjoys its authority only temporarily and has to permanently fight for it. In contrast, in a human society a leader can enjoy his or her authority for life and pass the title to his or her heirs. But for this to be possible the leaders have to make the people believe that they are under the protection of gods. For instance, early Egyptians believed that the pharaoh is a son of god. The authority of modern spiritual leaders (e.g., the Pope) is sanctioned by god as well. Finally, as I will argue later in this paper, the advantage of the good over the evil is impossible to maintain without the approval of gods.

The assumption that modern people believe in the supernatural powers of their leaders explains the effectiveness with which the leaders manipulate mass consciousness. The people of Japan believed that their emperor Hirohito (1901-1989), who ruled in the time of the World War II, was the descendant of gods ^[20]. This popular belief contributed to the fanatical stubbornness of the Japanese army’s resistance during the battles with the US army. In the battle of Okinawa (April 1945) Japanese suicidal pilots (kamikazes) inflicted heavy casualties on the American fleet, and it became clear that breaking Japan’s army resistance by regular weapon can only be done at a great cost. The awareness of this was a main factor in the American’s decision to use the atomic bomb. A kamikaze (“the divine wind” in Japanese) was a vol