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Magical thinking
- Type
- Concept
- Publisher
- Psychology
- Source
- Wikipedia ↗
The belief that inner states and outer events are connected — the psychological soil in which synchronicity grows.
Magical thinking is the belief that thoughts, words, and symbols can reach out and touch the world — that the inner and outer are connected by more than cause and effect. Anthropologists and psychologists have found it in every human culture ever studied.
That universality is the hinge of the synchronicity debate. Believers read it as a hint that the connection is real; skeptics read it as a fact about the human brain, which is the same everywhere and uses the same shortcuts everywhere. Synchronicity, in this view, is magical thinking in its most sophisticated form — the same habit, dressed in Jungian language.
The meaning
The universality of magical thinking, across every culture, is itself read as a hint that the connection is not entirely imagined.
The skeptic
Its universality is a fact about human minds, not about the world: the same cognitive shortcuts appear everywhere because the brain is the same everywhere.
About the source
The tendency to believe that thoughts, words, or symbols can influence the world, studied across anthropology and psychology.
Key takeaways
- The belief that thoughts and the world are connected.
- Universal across cultures, which cuts both ways in this debate.
- The underlying mental habit that synchronicity builds on.