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IN HIS ALWAYS QUIRKY BUT USUALLY insightful look into the human condition, comedian Woody Alien once remarked: "There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is how far it is from midtown and how late is it open?"1
In point of fact, the majority of people accept as a given that an unseen world of paranormal powers exists, and all that remains is for us to discover the details of its workings. Superstition and magical thinking are the core cognitions that drive belief in the paranormal. Over 40% of Americans, for example, believe in devils, ghosts, and spiritual healing.2 Most social scientists do not bother trying to understand why people believe in the paranormal, while many psychologists have characterized superstitious and magical thinking as a problem for which there is no ready explanation,3 or as "a label for a residual category-a garbage bin filled with various odds and ends that we do not otherwise know what to do with.'"4
Skeptics, of course, have not ignored superstitions and magical beliefs, and there exist today several international magazines, regular conferences, and dozens of excellent books that attempt to both explain the paranormal as well as understand why people believe in it. Explanations have ranged from personality traits, psychological motivation, and flawed cognition, to emotional instability, demographics, and social influences.5 From the purely scientific perspective of experimental psychology, however, our overall understanding of this area has yet to be adequately described and explained. This paper presents a new and integrative model that explains superstition, magical thinking, and paranormal beliefs.
The Need for a Conceptual Model
One of the primary problems facing a scientist studying superstition, magical thinking, and paranormal beliefs is defining what precisely the field entails. There is little agreement on how these ternis should be defined, outside of simply providing specific examples of each, and it is not clear how (or if), the constructs of "superstition," "magical thinking," and "paranormal (supernatural)" beliefs differ from each other, or how they differ from obviously false beliefs (e.g., "whales are fish"). Consequently, there is a strong need for a conceptual model that clarifies the meaning of magical, paranormal, and superstitious beliefs, and explains why rational Western people still believe in things that seem so irrational....