The new magical thinking.

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The new magical thinking Serge Moscovici Public Understanding of Science 2014 23: 759 DOI: 10.1177/0963662514537584 The online version of this article can be found at: http://pus.sagepub.com/content/23/7/759

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Classical Statement

The new magical thinking

Public Understanding of Science 2014, Vol. 23(7) 759–779 © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0963662514537584 pus.sagepub.com

Serge Moscovici

Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, France

Keywords magic, rationality, science, social representations

1. The return of the magical Far from subscribing to the motto of those who gave up, according to whom ‘there is nothing new under the sun’, I believe we will look back with envy at the era about to end. Science, long but an intellectual dream, had become one with the tree of society, rendering new luxurious shoots possible. With its conquering attitude, it had become the mind’s creation that was, one day, to bring light to all the dark zones of human life, put an end to shortages, vanquish disease, annihilate ignorance, chase away the fantasies and chimeras of our troubled pre-historical times, much as the wind dissipates away the clouds. After this, all would be basking in the sun of reason. Men, having discovered with it the means to fight against superstition and fear, its laboratories and calculations would bear the promise of freedom. The entire species’ fate was at stake, which is precisely what happened. And it happened at a time when science was enjoying a growing prestige: Was it not, day after day, going to turn into reality many a crucial human dream, and even some which it had not yet dreamed up? It was to explain the causes of that which is and to predict that which is to come, both for individual lives and for that of whole societies. Such a certainty, in scientific terms as in others, is all that men in the full swing of modernity can rely on. It is encapsulated in its purest form by the very word rationality. This word undoubtedly is the answer to the legitimate ideal of prediction of individual actions and reactions, and that of calculating how best to go about achieving ones’ aims. In all domains, one sees the flourishing of methods destined to improve the analysis of decisions in the economical or political domains, to treat the information at hand to ensure the success of an undertaking or take an objective view of reality. Most sciences developed by man are designed to acquire rationality, be it economics or cognitive psychology, or still the whole of contemporary high techs, of which the computer is the symbol. These tend to put us under the reign of logic, of logical processes applied to the resolution of problems of primordial interest. However, most unbearable of all paradoxes, one cannot help but notice that for the past quarter of a century all that we sought to banish from the mind, all those practices which were said, rightly or wrongly, to be mere superstitions or chimeras, all those are returning with a vengeance. One needs to only listen to what people talk about, to look around at how some state-of-the-art techniques are used, to be brutally surprised. Corresponding author: Serge Moscovici, Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme - REMOSCO Network - 190 avenue de France, 75013 Paris, France. Website: http://www.fmsh.fr/


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[…] In the midst of all this loud technology, people invest their desires and beliefs in practices of which no one expected that they would come back to implant themselves so imperiously on everyday life. The enthusiasm that existed for that which artificial intelligence rendered possible seems to have turned into an enthusiasm for an artificial superstition complete with software and its IT people. For the past three hundred years, one has said cogito est computo too often, so as not to wonder, when the motto has been verified, whether computo est cogito.

2. Magic, science and ideology […] In its recently acquired social usage, the word social cognition alone reminds us that we do not reflect on the world, but on a mental representation of the world. The same situation in the outside world to which several people are confronted may be represented in different ways, and the exactness of such representations effectively constructed can affect in a crucial manner the acts and communications that relate to them. Thus, if some of us were ahead of the trend and the rush towards it in calling a cat a cat, in coining the content of what is understood by a social cognition as a social representation, that is not what sets us apart. On this point, it is impossible to conceive of a clearer relationship between all those gathered here. But, given that the theory of social representations has made sure to integrate in its research programme the aim of understanding social phenomena, and not only to add a collective soul to mental phenomena, this relationship becomes less clear. The epithet ‘social’ is at stake here, as it defines for some a way of seeing cognitive life, while for others it is the very way cognitive life is. The result of this is two points of view, which could, until further notice, appear to be radically opposed. I said ‘that could appear’, because psychology, which some would like us to see as entirely attached to the former point of view, has lately shown a remarkable deal of flexibility. However, I would regret making you lose patience over an opposition, which tomorrow shall be but a souvenir. Wishing to remain faithful to our programme, I had to opt for a topic which has to do with a social phenomenon. That is why I have chosen to speak to you of the new magical thought, in the hope, of course, to find attentive ears, but also to stimulate an apetite for research. But this requires to have the means to think and talk about it. Yet, when we undertake the study of such phenomena, we try to isolate various mental operations (inferences, sketch) like so many elementary units analogue to the propositions that the mental operations of language would be. We then look at the way these operations are applied (classifying, comparing, implicate, etc.) to extract valid knowledge from the existing information. One assumes they are the same in all domains, be it ordinary life or science. Only their combination varies from one to the other to achieve a scientific, magical, common sense and so on … reasoning. The difference between these forms of knowledge lies primarily in the difference of the rules for combining those same cognitive operations. As they are repeated, a hierarchy of rules and inferences would emerge, basically much like a system of stable statements slowly solidifying much like a corpus of knowledge practically reliable. Put simply, the sum of these cognitive operations can lead at times to science, at others to magic, depending on the approach taken by the individuals who practice them. One must also take into account the scale of values which values the former, and frowns upon the latter. At the top, we find a rigorous and logical cognitive approach, attentive to information and methods which validate it. At the bottom, we find belief or tenacious prejudices, indifferent to facts, fascinated by illusions. Between those two extremes: errors, distortions and bias, against which one can immunise oneself only by staring truth in the face. Should one stick to those elementary operations, to their associations varying according to circumstances, one might be able to understand the scientific reasoning or the magical reasoning. But one would not understand science or magic, which are rather different things, namely systems of


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representations and autonomous practices, inherited from a distant past. Reasoning (scientific, magical, etc.) thus is too elementary, too abstract an expression, to designate adequately the knowledge corpuses that we distinguish, in the context of specific institutions and of distinct practices, and whose continuity is apparent throughout a large number of cultures. For they come from afar and are recreated in many places. Not to mention the experts and specialists, scientists, doctors and so on who have codified them and are initiated in their application. For now I shall call them mental formations, that is to say systems aiming to represent and put in practice knowledges, to communicate them by means of their own, so much so that one recognises them without difficulty. These formations could be compared to literary genres, such as, theatre and novels. Note that one does not understand the language of the theatre or the novel on the basis of grammar rules or propositions, but through the characters, which are on the one side on the stage, and on the other on paper. Conversely, one could not understand the nature of science or magic on the basis of the cognitive operations implied by the appropriate reasoning, but rather the opposite. Are those nothing but speculations? That remains to be seen. I might be putting too much forward, but I do believe that this notion of mental formation is essential to whoever wants to understand how humans know and act in society, and what the group to which they belong teaches them. Of course, that which one impregnates one’s self with throughout life, and which one applies, is science and magic, and so on, not such and such logical process. That must be known and explained. It might seem trivial or exterior. But in passing one can draw a conclusion which would be far less so. That is, that if cognitive psychology (just like artificial intelligence, by the way) has as its object the mental operations of individuals, social psychology has as its field the study of mental formations within which individuals reason and act. The former is interested in analytical products, the latter in synthetic products. In this, they complete and verify each other, much like the synthesis verifies the analysis. That, then, is my point of view: to not treat the elementary unit, cognition, schema, reasoning, as it is necessarily an abstraction. The units work together, are part of an orchestra, move forward as a group. There are types of mental operations, of reasonings, very different from one another, and which each have their own way of communicating, of articulating with others and to lead to action. The study of such operations, like that of knowledges, has focused too heavily on thought, and not enough on action, hence the idea of associating a style of thought to a type of action corresponding to it. […] It is an accepted opinion: science can be fallible, its theories can be criticised and the results of its actions can be questioned. On the other extreme, one knows too well how ideologies (always designated by an ‘ism’) refute the slightest error in their worldview and refuse to admit the smallest defeat regarding their plan of action. There is nothing more repetitive than their discourse ‘we were right all along’, when all proves the very opposite. And how boring is the chain of arguments attempting to prove that one is on the way to success, even when this is neither apparent nor supported by facts. As a matter of fact, any ideology sees itself as infallible, be they liberal or dogmatic in form, projecting itself as the only one capable of surviving to the vicissitudes of history. ‘The end of’ history, of class struggle, of religion, and so on expresses this vision of the instant in which, alone in this world, it will have the monopoly of truth and efficiency. It disqualifies in the same move the idea of ‘becoming’ and the judgement of validity, the might of history and the force of the critique, which all assume a world in which all threatens the tyranny of infallibility. Let us contemplate the other diagonal. Undoubtedly, all religion implies dogma, an infallible representation which cannot be subjected to discussion or dissension among its followers. One learns to believe and see in it that which is supposed to be seen in it, but one does not learn to doubt, hence to think of alternatives to what one must think. No one questions the Sacred Scriptures, the


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truthfulness of a revelation or the authority of a dogma. However, rituals, prayers and other actions under the realm of faith can fail. It might be invaluably beneficial to religions to see those as fallible and to attribute the responsibility to the believers. Indeed, facing the dissonance between an infallible representation and a practice which isn’t, how could the individual reduce it, if not by adhering to the former even more and by accepting the failure of the latter, which is where Job’s grandeur resides, for example? Magic, for its part, is more often encountered under the shape of a nebula-shared concepts and images, which are constantly reworked and revised. On the other hand, one requires of its practices that they be efficient beyond the reasonable, succeeding where all else has failed. And that by the simplest and most direct ways. In the magical field, only the wonderful can be accomplished to ridicule. It is the uncontrollable human fear of the irremediable, of failure, which expresses itself in the quest for the wonderful, even when it makes one smile. It is therefore understandable that all religions should always have incorporated an element of magic in their practices – the healing of souls, magical healings, and so on – to ensure their hold on followers. And that science should have borrowed from ideology the processes which render a theory infallible, that it turns into a dogma, a paradigm or a orthodox doctrine, to escape irritating controversies or the erosion with time. The same goes for science and ideology: it is always right. One undoubtedly debates this classification and the justifications I put forth for it. Let us admit it provisionally, without forgetting to note how all that is inherent to a mental formation has a link to the social. In fact, science and magic both presuppose a minimal pressure from society, a certain degree of deviance and individuality, or, to use an expression by Deconchy (1990), low social regulation. Inversely, religion and ideology coincide with the existence of an institution, a party or a Church seeking to integrate individuals, to standardise their thoughts and actions. In other words, they exert a strong social regulation. When it loosens, as is happening today in the case of Catholicism or Socialism, one notes a drop in their numbers, or even a total rout. But I will not dare be more assertive on the relations between mental formations and social regulations, because in this domain everything has already been said, everything can be said, without anyone being able to bring the slightest shred of proof. Regarding magic, let us remember one essential thing for the immediate future. It shares with science a tolerance for its questioning and the fallibility of its representations, the same distanciation from dogmatic fixations. This often disconcerts and provokes confusion at the limits, or their lability. It is different from science in that it pretends to an absolute efficiency determining both the way of thinking and the way of acting, subjected to no independent control. In magic, one is simultaneously the judge and the judged, one cannot be one without being the other. Verifying a method, repeating an operation, collecting testimonies, all these operations that anyone in science can perform are forbidden to those who have not had an intimate experience, to the non-initiated. Therein, it is communicated but does not communicate and retains all its mystery in the eyes of all. The mystery of the act’s all mighty nature. However, to admit, even provisionally, those remarks on mental formations have a totally unexpected consequence. They change the nature of the question that we must answer. Think of it. For almost 20 years, the research of social psychologists has followed the same guiding principle and they have devoted themselves to the same thing: to explore the limits of ordinary thought, that of the person on the street or common sense, or of any thought which does not qualify as science with its logic. So, we discover their flaws, their derivations and the slippery slopes on which they slip into error. Curiously, no one had ever envisaged seriously that the human being could possibly freely choose his hiatus, deviations or errors, that he might prefer them and consider himself satisfied with them. Think of how many people would still bet at horse races, follow their general practitioner’s (GP) advice or invest in the stock exchange had they not made such a choice.


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If this is a constant, then one must ask the reverse question: What are the limits of science which prevent us from using it in everyday life and push us to use another mental formation? More precisely, how can it be that in our society it seems more judicious to use magic instead of science, without attributing this to ignorance or a failure of reason of the proverbial layman? In what follows, I do not intend to emit an opinion of some sort of the vices and virtues of rationality. But simply to show that in answering this question, one explains certain aspects of magic.

3. Almighty actions and their effects Magic – the word itself holds the promise of a world of surprising and sumptuous possibilities. Even those not inclined to esoterica, or who manifest no interest for the occult and do not believe in it, even those feel attracted to those practices. It is as if they hoped to find in it a marvellous secret that normally escapes them and which they deem important to know. But most of all, the idea of those practices appears to awaken in each of those a persisting belief in miracles, in those hidden forces which are liberated by springing to the broad daylight. Proof of this are the emotional reactions triggered by the idioms charm, clairvoyance, to cast a spell, which awaken strong images. The belief in the immediate efficiency of human action and the disproportionate effects it can create is irresistible. André Breton’s phrase ‘Man proposes and decides’ sums it up entirely. The confidence in the virtual almighty power of this action is so elementary, so natural throughout all cultures that one does not note its scandalous nature. But if the magical has not disappeared, can one assert that it has evolved? Does a new magical thought exist as such? I mean a magical thought intrinsic to our culture, which justifies the question, this thought having often been considered archaic, a mere relic of the past? One speaks of ‘magical remnants’. If it were so, it would seem incongruous to grant it the epithet of new. Even if this incongruity is not central to my argument, it is part of it. In it resides the source of any success, of any audience in contemporary societies. For the time being, let us attempt to think clearly about this and to take the elementary precaution of knowing what it is we refer to when we evoke magic. We would first have to refer to the power we possess to face any change, event, individual or collective catastrophe, without exceptions. We would be in a position to put the natural forces and the course of things in chains through speech, motions or an intelligent tool, thus to subject the world to the efficient power of humans. […] Here just like anywhere else, the uncontrollable world of images and that of magic intertwine inextricably. The latter comes across as a sort of double, a thought which recreates, on the mode of the strange, a familiar representation of ordinary things. A card from a deck of cards, a phrase, a dining table, a crystal ball and a piece of software are not meant to have out-of-the-ordinary effects. Just as any widespread notion – the unconscious, the black hole, hypnosis, and so on – is designed a priori to serve anything else but science. These are not magical notions or objects, but they enter the magical realm as soon as are given an offbeat, maybe even worrying, meaning in a context that is so, such as computers which draw the curves of your so-called biorhythm and deliver you a horoscope. While remaining what it is, the software becomes its own double, strange in many respects, which does not take away any of the merits of the surprising invention: a portable clairvoyant. Evidently, in any case, magical thought shifts and doubles up objects as much as notions, making them at the same time in and out of reach, banal and nonetheless extraordinary. However, it achieves this, this alliance of opposites fascinates. One indisputably can find its social counterpart in the fact, observed by Mauss (1950 [1990]), that magicians are found among the deviant types, and that magical cults are practised at the margin of religious and technical cults. But also that the qualities according to which one chooses those individuals have some psychic or physical oddity. The respect they are paid is simultaneously one brought about by fear and trust, the oddities and deficiencies of a person otherwise similar to others being the sign of an exceptional power, contrary to the normal, considered as harmless, granted, Downloaded from pus.sagepub.com at Bibliotheques de l'Universite Lumiere Lyon 2 on October 6, 2014

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but also as having no special power or appeal. In short, no act or idea is in itself magical, and all act or idea can become so, if it is attached a dose of strangeness. The slightest return of the ordinary, on the other hand, tends to weaken that power. The card of spades or diamonds is given this quality in the hands of a clairvoyant, and loses it in the hands of a card player. That is why one distinguishes between the familiar world and that which one wishes to ‘magnify’, the latter being set aside from the common use. Because it belongs in principle to the non-familiar world, that which is upside down. You will tell me that we so far only concerned ourselves with the surface of things, with feelings, albeit sophisticatedly. So far, the aspect or feeling triggered by magic, which allowed us to recognise it, at best unveils the meaning of the thought which occupies itself with ‘producing successes’ and draws its persuasive strength from the call on utterances, beliefs, the meaning of a rather badly defined parascience. But each time it manifests itself, it is on the realm of action that it is judged, either as the announcement of a failure, or as the source of success. This remark suffices to distinguish it from scientific thought, itself judged on the basis of truth and error. Thus, between the thought that we are concerned with and the action, there is a much more intimate alliance than there is in the case of science, which preserves an independence between the conceptual elements and the empirical elements. This alliance is so intimate that Mauss (1950 [1990]) felt compelled to add how much magic is continuous, and to which point its elements, which tightly stand together, appear to be but the various reflections of the same thing. Acts and representations are so inseparable in magic that one could well call it a practical idea. (p. 84)

For those who decide to resort to it, the problem resides in not separating them, so as to take full advantage of its efficiency, while making one’s self immune to the risks inherent to any confusion between representation and reality, between knowing and doing if one swaps one for the other. Do not think that by insisting on this alliance, on the importance of the criteria for success or failure, that I shy away. But from what would I shy away? Well, of the clarifications that I owe you regarding the strangeness that magical thought cultivates. Where does it stem from and what is so singular about it? Should I abstain from doing so, you would accuse me, and it would not be the first time (Moscovici, 1988b), of settling for vague notions. In reality, I have always strived to come as close as possible to a clarity which would, however, leave this notion a degree of intuitive freedom. This ambition one finds in sciences as in arts of defining and clarify to excess is but the admission of a weakness. But let us pass on this. The more one gets used to the idea that magical thought aims to act, to ensure the success of an action even if all odds are against it, the more we find natural that it should spill over the borders of the habitual and the expected. How could one otherwise explain the enthusiasm caused a century ago by animal magnetism, hypnosis, the ‘psychic sciences’ and, nowadays, by certain medical, dietary, economical or psychiatric practices. ‘There is no such word as ‘can’t’’, so the saying goes. One could also say, ‘There is no such word as ‘can’t’ in magic’! A rational mind hates nothing more than this ‘will to success’, according to Bergson, at any cost. Legitimately so, if science and ordinary knowledge deliver us the laws and relations between phenomena, it is precisely because they conceive of an order between causes and effects. That is actually the way through which they impose limits to the possible, define what is real and what is not, as well as what counts as information on the real. In much the same way that the principles of classical mechanics were born the day it was recognised that there can be no perpetual movement, and those of modern physics when it was agreed that no speed can be superior to that of light. Such a vigilant separation of the possible


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and the impossible entails a distinct localisation of observable phenomena and unobservable phenomena, of what one must and must not do. But, besides this knowledge so concerned with respecting limits, one can see the outline of another one which is elaborated to go beyond, to abolish at a given point the separations between the observable and the imaginary. It is put to use to continue understanding, but mostly to reproduce on the realm of the mind this force, which, according to Malinowski (1955), would reproduce ‘something which nature cannot produce, only the power of magic’. Thus, a thought which justifies the possibility to act there where physical and biological laws no longer allow for it. The strangeness which I mentioned comes from this transgression, enlarging the world of possibles with the aim of conceiving an event or change that can only be surprising, excessive. But that is enough on this point. I am getting to the meaning of this strangeness which manifests such a profound tendency. Namely, that in parallel to the normal way of transforming and representing things, there is another one which overturns or diverts it, and possesses its own causal sequence. In other words, the parallel coexistence of rational thought and of magical thought seems to impose itself. […] One must therefore assume a different knot (Schopenhauer, 1986), a link between phenomena, which, self evidently, can have no link to a logic or pretend to an exterior validity. That is why the thought which expresses it deviates and upsets the rules which one would normally have to follow. Thus, if one says that magical thought is riddled with mistakes, one would be wrong to think it is because of a cognitive inability of humans. Or conversely, to turn mistakes and absurdities into the indicator of such a thought, as has often been claimed. I would actually consider them the conditions for its existence and the belief on it. In other words, gaps, the shortcomings of ordinary thought did not manifest first, so that magical thought might have formed from them. On the contrary, it is because humans sought a different way to think and act and put it into practice that those so-called gaps and shortcomings of the mind obstinately persist. As magic seems to them to succeed, it was seen as a difference in mind, rather than a failing mind. And we shall consider it in this way too. But this requires to give up on the idea of limits to our mental abilities and to recognise a diversity of those abilities according to the goals pursued in a society.

4. The epistemology of magical representations It was foreseeable that one day research on errors, biases, illusions of ordinary thought should stumble on magical thought. It was Schwader (1977) who first, in an original study, established the link between the results of social psychology and the problem with which anthropology has long been concerned. Once more, the numerous facts accumulated in our science only receive a meaning on the condition that they are considered in relation to a social reality and a problem of importance. Schwader asserts that magical thought distinguishes itself in that, on one hand, it relies on a similarity by combining causal judgements, and, on the other hand, in that it refuses to take into account information based on the frequency and the probability of events. […] In line with this, he is led to conclude that magical thought is the expression of a limitation of the cognitive processing conducted by the human mind. It is a form of non correlational reasoning used when objects and events do not assemble or mutually exclude one another at the conceptual (or semantic) level in our mind. (p. 637)

I will not insist at this stage on the theoretical difficulties such a conclusion brings up. There are common to all conclusions offered here and there in social psychology. This study appears to


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highlight, and that is why it interests us, the same inclination towards recognising magic through the gaps identified at a given moment in the mind, and, in our present time, in the gaps identified by social psychology through precise research led in laboratories. Indisputably, they have always served to define a thought that is beneath reason and science. However, through the extreme confusion in the use of the terms ‘magic’, ‘prelogical’, ‘wild’, ‘mythical’, ‘working-class’, one pays specific attention to the procedures which lead the human mind to fail. But, there is no confusion as to how the content of these terms is seized. Each and everyone designate an unconventional and spontaneous knowledge in his or her own way, in contrast to a conventional and institutionalised knowledge. The symptoms are rightly perceived as biases, distortions or errors. I admit that to this end there is no other available means, for they contribute to the very genesis of this upside-down knowledge and the distance to the legitimate knowledges. More precisely, biases and deviations allow humans, when they want to act outside of the conventions, to shirk from the grip of reason, just as they resort to metaphors and parabolas to communicate, or to fiction to create. One would be justified to think that primarily it is logical weakness on which mental and psychological strength rely. One should however be highly circumspect before adopting such conclusions. In this manner, we might prevent the rise of a new dogma, which would curiously be the dogma of science as the revealed truth of our mental life. […] We must go further in order to uncover the contours of the mental formation itself of which it is but one of the significant indicators, although one can never be too sure to achieve this when it comes to magic, considering how much its contours fluctuate. However, the common traits exist, of which here is a brief preview: 1. The under-determination of representations by the information on events and facts that each of us experiences is the most generalised. This equates to saying that one can conceive several different representations, non-repetitive, susceptible to predict the same event and the same facts, without there being a way to choose among them basing one’s self on observable facts and those only. Without pushing it as far as some science philosophy professors one must note a high degree of liberty of the representative and semantic elements, and the autonomy that they enjoy in relation to the verification procedure, thus in relation to the elements of information at large. Only science attempts, the best it can, to limit this autonomy through the successive reductions to a dominating representation. Other mental formations on the other hand at best manage to immunise themselves against this experience which could prove them wrong. This explains one of the major consequences of this under-determination, namely the watertightness to the information or the experience, long glimpsed by Lévy-Bruhl (1910 [1951]). For this reason, the reflections of the so-called primitives – but not only primitives – ‘are always engaged in pre-perceptions, preconceptions, prelinks, one might even say prereasoning’ (Lévy-Bruhl, 1910 [1951]: 114). In today’s language, those judgements are always involved in networks of signification, semantic chains associating the nature of the objects or people in a pre-established direction. Representations attempt to slip away from the constraints of the outside world, escaping an exact replica. Thus, from the word orange, you will not draw just any metaphor, because it eliminates from the start all those that do not indicate a colour or a fruit. The poet Paul Eluard obliges to it in his own fashion by writing ‘The earth is blue like an orange’. In this respect, it is impossible to conceive a clearer situation. A representation cannot be entirely validated or invalidated by experiences or information for it is not born out of them nor depends on them. Those, however, who believe that it is impossible to fight ideas by facts give in to an illusion much greater than that which they claim to dissipate.


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2. It is becoming a tendency to put the changes happening in our environment down to people. In support of this tendency, one can report concordant experiences showing that most people put effects down to internal or individual factors, neglecting exterior factors, those of the situation. That scientific education should forbid such a way of explaining phenomena is not dubious. However, it persists and demands attention each time this prohibition is not renewed. Much has been written on this fundamental error made in numerous occasions. And one has rightly detected in it a mental bias, a deviation from the causal and logical sequence. But this error has another origin, much deeper still. In his highly interesting and instructive books, Louis Dumont goes back repeatedly over a reversal operated by modern science. Namely, that which represents reality so as to subject the relationships of men to men to that to objects, when traditional civilisations subject the latter to the former. In this fashion, individuals can envisage things as spectators of an exterior and neutral world. It is plain to see when considering, for example, the attitudes of researchers or specialised doctors. However, it would seem that most people, outside of the realm of science, share a representation which subordinates the relationship with objects to those between persons. More precisely, they conceive of a cause to effect link marked by humanity. That is to say, charged with an intention or a meaning whose action answers to the aims of individuals or groups. In general, it is in their favour to do so, because in practice, it is easier for them to understand and foresee the behaviour of humans than it is that of objects. […] 3. Under those conditions, it must be that, in the recognition of things and people, we are guided above all by an image or a signification. What we perceive of their behaviour, what we take away of their appearance, is but the essential in guiding us in the corresponding system of thought. Basing ourselves on those ideas, that is on mental representations, we attempt to find instances, examples which complete them. Those only become complete representations, however, if those instances confirm them or provide them with a greater coherence. Thus, when representing in my head a person with an introvert or aggressive character, I will as a priority the gestures or utterances that are consistent with it, and will neglect all the rest. The same applies when it comes to solving a problem, to recognise a face, interpret a text. Numerous authors support the hypothesis that humans have a fundamental tendency towards searching for information that is in line with their current beliefs, representations or hypotheses, and avoid collecting the proofs that could falsify them. And this tendency seems to be inherent to magic, whose vocation it is to ensure the failure of failure, while avoiding all that could deny it, thus diminishing its might. ‘Everywhere we see magic at work,’ Mauss (1950 [1990]) writes, ‘magical judgements are anterior to magical experiences to magical experiences; those are measures of rituals or chains of representations; experiences are only made to confirm it and never succeed in invalidating them’ (p. 117). We note that in this instance it expresses a process, a deliberate operation. It consists in realising only a part of the possible experiences, the other part being judged without value. Or, at the very least, one will be shown the way to finding the explanation for its failure to succeed. As do doctors whose treatments do not have the expected results, or the clairvoyants whose predictions are proved wrong. We just said that people are immune to information. Let us add that, even in cases when they are more open-minded, they tend to prefer information in line with their anterior representations. Digging deeper below the foundations of this bias, one would find at its origin a partiality towards positive experiences and judgements (Evans, 1990), more reassuring than negative experiences and judgements, which always give rise to apprehension. At least that is the interpretation drawn in psychological and social terms.


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4. Finally, instead of reasoning in a systematic manner on samples and frequencies, individuals tend to use short cuts to get to fast solutions. Not only because those make away with a lot of effort and a detour via abstraction, but also because each and everyone is interested mostly in his or her own experience and considers unique cases. The novelist Max Frisch (1957) gives an illuminating example of this in a dialogue between a man and a woman whose daughter was bitten by a snake: - Did you know, asks Walter, that the rate of death due to snake bites is only of 3 to 10%? […] – You, with your statistics, says she. If I had a hundred daughters, who had all been bitten by a viper, then yes! Then I would only be loosing one to three daughters. Astonishingly little! You are perfectly right … I only have one child, says she. (pp. 135–136)

What could those who worry about the element or the individual expect of the frequency with which events happen, or the correlation between those? Failing to attach the right importance that is due to big numbers, they unduly trust particular examples and the law of small numbers. Tversky and Kahneman (1980) have noted, in a series of classical studies, to what extent highly educated young students are indifferent to the probabilities and their fluctuations in a population. Others having come to the same conclusion in their suite, there is no reason to doubt the inability of individuals to use them when making inferences on a person or a situation. And I subscribe to the widespread opinion that normal adults are little inclined to think in terms of frequencies and correlations between the experiences they have had, observed or have heard of. […] I do not know whether it is worth continuing this discussion to clarify it. It is undoubtedly a shortcoming in people that they should underestimate statistics and correlations. Furthermore, they are sometimes led, not to ignoring but to the substituting correlations with coincidences to take a stand on a relationship between two events and their damages. Acting otherwise would be difficult and not much more rational. Thus, if there is a shortcoming, it is only partially illogical. After reminding all that magic is THE art of coincidences, one will have understood why it is at times hard to catch it in the wrong, and even to refute it in its most subtle operations. A last comment on this. The lack of inclination for statistics and the co-occurrence of events, far from being universal, appear to mainly characterise our culture. At the very least, one might hypothesise that, given the fact cited above, the notion of contingency overlaps up to a certain point with that of coincidence. And, the English anthropologist Horton (1990) noted that: In cultural traditions, the idea of coincidence is barely developed. The tendency is rather of giving all unforeseen event a defined cause. The idea that such an event could arise accidentally through the convergence of two causal sequences is inconceivable, because it is intolerable. To accept it would be to admit that the event at stake is not entirely explainable. That would therefore induce a admission of ignorance. (p. 62)

It is precisely on this matter that the most distinctive trait of magical thought appears. It offers explanations and identified causes where science must stick to probable conjectures, and consider several causal sequences. All that is needed for the contained desire to understand all and to master all to find ways to express itself and to find the promise of satisfaction is the wisely maintained ignorance. What is more, it is educational to observe the following evolution: At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, it seems obvious to search for the distinctive trait of the socalled primitive magic – and then of dreams and the unconscious – in the disrespect of the principle of non-contradiction. And, as soon as one has started to study on the ground and in the laboratory the reasoning of our contemporaries, what does one see? Well, that the distinctive trait of the magic one might call civilised (Moscovici, 1991) is revealed in its indifference to correlations and


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statistics. Not because of an inability to make use of those, but because one does not see the point of doing so. Schwader (1977) notes, ‘Most normal adults are capable of thinking in terms of correlations, but do not apply this concept in their everyday judgements’ (p. 619). Remembering this tendency of magic to invert the course of nature, the sequence of causes and effects, thus of the principles of science, one is not surprised. Our recent ancestors’ science was founded on determinism. Ours is recently more and more based on the principles of probabilities and statistics. It is a world less calm, more unforeseeable that it describes to us, whose lack of order is not assimilated without a level of turbulences. It is, to speak clearly, an arbitrary world, full of quantum noise. The new magic exists to counter this arbitrariness and to dominate the noise.

5. The map is not the territory, rather it represents the cartographer This is unsettling to most psychologists and even social psychologists. Without being clear about what shocks them, they deem appropriate that we should have to treat phenomena historically and socially, which, if they are cognitive, certainly obey to causes and, in this case should, they think, be cut into pieces to be reproduced in the laboratory, to be explained by the neuronal factors used in sciences. Reduce magic so as to subject it to experiences, they would appear to be saying, and we will welcome it. Until then, we will disregard as irrelevant all that is said on the matter. Because research on social representations does not proceed in this fashion, nor does it satisfy itself with neuronal factors, it is deemed not entirely scientific. And because the hypotheses it puts forward do not always subscribe to the elementary shape that allows to verify them in the laboratory, many would readily declare it without links to cognition, even social cognition. Such is, I believe, the implicit reasoning used by some psychologists and social psychologists too to distinguish the phenomena of which they take care, and those of which we take care. So that one might be led to assert that social cognitions constitute a class of its own, capable of being miniatured to serve for experimentations in the space of the laboratory, isolated from their real context in society. I find the same distanciation, the same disinterest for the concrete, at the basis of the objections made against such and such hypothesis that has to do with phenomena essential to our social psychology. Without a doubt, similar objections will be raised against the hypotheses you will put forward to explain the attributes of the new magical thought, which are not fit for such a carving, to such isolation. That will not prevent me from uttering that which I hold to be true. To start with, it might not be bad to convince one’s self that the suggested explanations are at the very least insufficient. Furthermore, they are neither very numerous, nor very elaborate, they therefore should not be requiring our attention for very long. The most widespread assumes considers that the emergence of magical thought is due to a lack of vigilance to reason, or even to science. Whatever the personal or collective motives, individuals who draw their information from the environment and use them to build a world representation, do not follow the necessary precautions of rigour to verify them according to adequate rules. Caring little for this negligence, they take into consideration mainly the resemblance between facts, their family air, their superficial concordance, instead of controlling them, analysing them and submitting them to criticism. Motivated by their desire, they are led to lend faith to the most dubious testimonies, to the fuzziest observations, with the same certitude with which they believe in the existence of the sun or the Russian revolution. To illustrate this conception, I will only quote one author: “Repressed by science”, Bergson writes, “the inclination towards magic remains and awaits its hour. Should science relax its watch for a moment, magic immediately irrupts into our civilised society, as the slightest sleep is used by to satisfy the desire repressed in the awakened hours.” (Bergson, 1932 [1976]: 181)


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One might be convinced by such an argument, if one knew in general what such an inclination is and why it lurks in the sleep of reason, if it is not another name for desire. And would one say that the dream remains with us when we are awake and conscious? Evidently not, since each night we dream another as we sleep. You might notice here, as it does itself, a shift from nocturnal magic to the night-like quality of magic, sleep of the mind. However, you will not forget the most troubling thing: that the eras when magic prospers seem to coincide with those when science flourishes. […] If what an American philosopher claimed is true, namely, that the card is not the territory, it seems, however, to reflect the beliefs of the cartographer. The reason put forward today is that the thinking brain faces a problem of reduction of the massive information which it receives; any attempt at treating the total of the available information is bound to fail. One then naturally thinks that – and it is the hypothesis to which most people rally – the insufficiencies and sophisms of magical inference are due to the limited information ability of ordinary people. And even that they prefer to ignore as much as possible the logical rules or statistics that they understand, and apply in some circumstances. This is an euphemism that leads to the claim that the human mind does not try to satisfy the canons of reason but prefers to save its energy. One can defend this position, it is even irrefutable, for the very simple motive that we do not know how to evaluate the brain’s ability to treat information, nor to limit it. It is surely as valid as Le Bon’s or Tarde’s theses on economy, or even of mental laziness. But it is no more valid either. A simple glimpse at this explanation shows that its theoretical premises are disputable. Surely is not surprising to hear its advocates claim that humans believe, let us say, in magic, because they do not reason correctly on the observations they make. They apply an incorrect appreciation on the random distributions, choosing variable samples which they recombine in the expectation of more precise forecasts (Einhorn and Hogarth, 1978), which does not prevent them from manifesting an unshakable trust in their judgements and opinions, as if they exactly reflected reality. ‘Thus’, write Tversky and Kahneman (1980), people are more inclined to trust judgements which are questionable, a phenomenon one might well coin the illusion of validity. As with other errors of judgement and perception, this illusion of validity persists even when its illusionary nature has been recognised. (p. 249)

It is rather regrettable to observe it, but it is even more desolating to have to remain at the level of observation. The fault lies with the great negligence of the authors who indulge in making such claims, without noting that it applies to the thought of individuals. When, in many respects, it seems obvious that thinking is rather a group affair, which has to do with communication between people, with traditions and established processes to resolve problems. Yes, clinical psychologists do not take into account statistical information because their job is to better comprehend individual stories. But accountants pay them much attention by following the rules of accounting in which they dwell (Smith and Kida, 1991). I could multiply examples. At any rate, one cannot confuse the properties of a mental formation of science, of magical or technical thought, with that of each mind taken individually. It might seem arbitrary to want to explain them in function of individual psychology, when one defines such a formation containing nonetheless a world, action or judgement conception, by considering it uniquely thought the prism of the true or the false on the basis of what is valid or not. As if magic, for example, never was anything more than a collection of lies due to the lack of attention to the real and nothing else. One could say of the proponents of such a view what Wittgenstein (1982) said about the English anthropologist Frazer, when commenting his Golden Bough: ‘The way Frazer exposes the magical and religious conceptions of those men is not satisfying: it makes those conceptions pass for errors. So St Augustine was in the wrong when he evoked God on each page of the Confessions’ (p. 13).


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Clearly, they correspond to uninterrupted chains of superstitions and absurdities. But they are unique in that they provide a means of understanding, of going beyond appearances, and in that, despite centuries, they still move us thanks to a subtle force, which draws the following cutting judgement from the great philosopher: ‘What a narrow conception of spiritual life Frazer has! Consequently: what inability to understand another life than his own English life in his time’ (Wittgenstein, 1982, p. 17). Just like others would not understand any other life than that of an expert or an academic of their time. Surely, none of us has formed their conceptions alone. And, once created, they diffuse well beyond the border posts of each mind. The individual does not choose them, even if he or she participates in their formation according to his or her best abilities. Anyway, they do not choose them according to a criterion of truth or error, for they are what supplies him or her with this criterion. Wittgenstein (1982) notes this: ‘My world vision, I do not possess it because I have convinced myself of its correctness; nor because I am convinced of its correctness. It is the inherited basis from which I distinguish between true and false’ (p. 94). Even for those who do not inherit it and create it with other humans, it nonetheless remains that the distinction is born at the same time as the representation, the image in the making. In this respect, the knowledge that people have are objective; if they were a mere individual phenomenon, they would be subjective. To share them with other humans, ancestors or contemporaries, is what makes them objective. As such, we do not only deduct them from our own experience, but also from the pre-existing existence and associated interpretations which circulate in the social milieu. This seems to be the case for those which are at the foundation of magical representations, or at least for many of them. This is what our hypothesis would like to take into account. More precisely, it aims to reconnect their emergence to a significant fact of our contemporary society.

6. The double link of reason The time has come to express this hypothesis and to show what it is worth. I will not insist on the observational difficulties that it raises, which research should soon be able to resolve. I have indicated elsewhere (Moscovici, 1991) how it articulates with the theory of social representations, so that it is unnecessary to come back to this here. It will suffice to mention here the question to which it must answer, the principal fact to explain. Whether we want it or not, the two hypotheses above want to account for the circumstances, and then the limits that prevent us from following the processes of science to consider the ordinary facts of our lives. But, as I mentioned earlier, it would be more fitting to know why, on so many occasions, these processes no longer apply and why we can only rely on scientific thought. Furthermore, it would contradict itself, if we did so. It relies itself on a shared representation of man’s nature, and is culturally obliged to stick to it. As it is not proven that this representation is unique, one can raise the question: Is there another one which leads to using processes of inference forbidden by science, and for which presumed biases, shortcomings and illusions have an immediate legitimacy, as long as common sense prevails? Is it inadmissible, in fact, that this substantial part of psychic activity should needlessly take place in our society. First, I shall ask you to interrogate your memories from when you were sick or came in contact with someone who had a serious disease and was probably going to die soon. When the doctor talks of a general cause and alludes to statistics to explain the chances of developing the disease, what operation is he or she performing? The doctor obeys to the rules of his or her science and relates an individual case to a population ensemble, and thus he or she brings an individual case down to a general situation. He or she in no way negates that you, the patient, are suffering, that your disease is part of a singular history. However, the doctor’s diagnostic and his or her prognostic are based on impersonal criteria and apply to any patient. But this cannot satisfy you, and immediately you wonder: ‘Why me?’ ‘Why did I get sick and not others?’, as if the chances of getting the disease


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were one in two or three, and it nonetheless got you. Or still, how could it be that among all the diseases that one can get, you should be getting the most invalidating? This is one way of orientating one’s self in this domain, and many others, which has deep consequences. It is a matter of the depth that the individual taken separately from the rest, from the group, acquires, and the fact that he is recognised psychically and collectively as a universe of its own. […] Such distinctions in fact are the reminder of the wounds that any split with the family, school, friends, work colleagues inflicts on us periodically in a society destined for mobility. One can hardly observe the evolution of our societies without getting a feeling that this interior push for more individual independence is accentuating. A choice has to be made each minute, and one must make it alone, without having the certainty of one’s close ones’, one’s friends or even one’s children’s support. In a sense, in most countries recently conquered by individualism, the individual has become the centre of our representations. But one would have to enter such details regarding the historical reasons, the relationship to the market economy, the moral ideal and the educational constraints, that I deem it quicker to go directly to the hypothesis, rather than having to make a detour towards what I have dealt with already (Moscovici, 1988a, 1989). Let us simply say that the social representation of the individual, shared by all, dominates most problems or solutions sought. It conceives of it as an independent, autonomous entity that is self-sufficient. An entity which, one must add, has a unique combination of attributes (traits, abilities, motives), and behaves above all based on those (Markus and Kitayama, 1991). According to this representation, the duty to fulfil who one is as an individual comes before anything else (Greenwald, 1980; Singer, 1984; Westen, 1985). It therefore determines the relationships between its knowledges and acts. Louis Dumont distinguishes two ways to link them. The first consists in legitimising the agreement between the former and the latter at the level of society, as is the case in rituals, for example. And the second to introduce the individual as a guarantor. In this case, says Dumont (1983), ‘there is no significant world order, and it is up to the individual subject to establish the relationship between representations and action, that is widely between social representations and action’ (p. 255). And, should we take into account such indications, but also follow this line of observation, we can see in what state magical thought comes to be located. Indeed, most of the time, what one attempts to know or predict is a particular case, the success or failure of a singular destiny. When the patient asks, ‘why me?’, he or she expresses what is at the heart of his or her social representation and that of others. So it is for the child who hurts himself or herself, for the businessman who takes risks, the unemployed who has lost his or her job or even the researcher who judges his or her own contribution to his or her field of research. But it is in the nature of science, and the reasoning associated with it, to not be in a position to answer, nor to take any interest in a singularity, because, as one says, there is no science but that of the general. Like nature, it treats all in the same way. It does not conceive of a special cause for Peter and another one for Paul, nor can it explain why the effect is caused in one and not the other. If our science and our established knowledges provide us with the law and the link between phenomena, it is, of course, because they involve a uniform causal sequence, applicable to the majority. Thus, the individual aiming to understand what is happening to him or her as a person and to anticipate the effects on his or her life could not make use of it. That is why he or she turns to other forms of knowledges, other modes of reasoning which allow this. Thereby, he or she turns away from those deemed logical and correct, limiting their value. From a general knowledge, he or she only wants to retain what applies to his or her particular case. […] In short, it seems to me believable that the diffusion of the new magical thought is to a great extent the result of the diffusion of the less new social representation at the heart of which the individual is located. In other cultures, other conditions may exist. But in ours, even more so now that it is exacerbated, individualism


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leads to the magical that is inherent to us. It is undoubtedly not the only reason, but it is the most logical one, if not the most obvious one. However, this social representation, and the mode of thought associated with it, deserves our attention. It can eventually contribute to explain the biases and errors in social psychological terms, and no longer in terms of individual psychological. How should one understand the preference manifested for the causes assigned to the person to the detriment of those assigned to the situation? It is because the person appears to be the stable and decisive factor when we are concerned with an event. Ichheiser (1943) had already glimpsed this, when he declared that personal causality reflects the ideology which leads us ‘interpret in our daily life the behaviour of individuals in function of the specific personal characteristics rather than in function of specific situations’ (p. 151). That this way of seeing things should be shared, that it should be a trait shared by all in the culture, explaining its persistence and popularity, is not surprising. It comes from what has become a belief, as Nisbett and Ross (1980) note, it is hard to prove, that people subscribe to a form of ‘general theory’ encompassing all from the relative impact of opposed ‘dispositional’ factors to ‘situational’ factors. One is however right to assume that a ‘dispositional’ theory is generally shared by almost all socialised members of our culture. It is certainly part of the world conception of what one calls the Protestant ethic. (p. 31)

In other words, this ‘theory’ in brackets is a social representation of the psychic faculties derived from the Protestant ethic. And, we know that the latter has for the most part formed a practical and modern idea of the individual. It forces it to sublimate itself in regard to others, to sublimate its relations with them through a unbending collective discipline (Moscovici, 1988a). Such would thus be the foundation on which the ‘dispositional theory’ developed, which incites us to claim the cause for events to people’s dispositions, an error so often observed in our laboratories. I subscribe to this interpretation, though I would like to express a reservation regarding ordinary thought. The latter does not have the particularity to make a mistake on the cause, but rather to neglect the fact that a contradiction necessarily exists between the cause which originates in the situation and that which comes from the person. Thus, it uses the one or the other depending on circumstances without noting any contradiction. Both explanations are held together, complementing each other, far from mutually excluding each other. […] It is not only a matter of reluctance towards going from all to one, from the category to the individual. There is even a prohibition certainly linked to the position that the individual holds in our social representations. In matters of social prejudices, it is obvious. We are discouraged from assigning to each member of a group the characteristics of the group. And we are charged, even disciplined, if we judge a Black like the Black, a Jew like the Jew or a criminal like the criminal in general. One must stick to the particular, to personal cases and individual behaviours. In legal terms, it is blatant. One is imperatively required not to take into account the social category to which the accused belongs, nor the frequency of his or her crime, nor still the fact that his or her parents might have committed the same crime. As soon as one obliterates collective responsibility, the link to the population, to the frequency of the crime in this population for example, is treated as non-information. It is only in the traditional societies of days gone by and totalitarian societies of today that one takes it into account, precisely because the person, as a distinct entity, does not have an existence in the social representation of the former, and is negated in the latter. The matter is just as blatant in the personalisation of political, economical and media life. If a man comes forward for elections, if he looks for a situation, one will first collect information on


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his tastes, his character, the morality of his private life, to judge him and choose him if relevant. Even parties, businesses, or unions are assimilated in the media to an individual which becomes its coat of arms. We are believers in identity, that is to say in the unique and the different. We are increasingly interested, not in what is common, but in what is not. In that case, information on the collective becomes secondary, and strongly risks going unnoticed when no explicit demand for its use is made. This has been observed in several experiments, since experts or participants to whom one recommends to pay more attention do take into account frequencies and their correlations. Social psychologists are absolutely right to say that in general adults are not very inclined to take them into account. However, they are looking in the wrong direction when they assign this lack of inclination to the way people think, and not to what they think, when they neglect the social representation of people that relates to what they deem worth knowing for themselves or others. What is more, however fragile the explanation offered here, it nonetheless has a certain coherence and even good chances of being proven empirically. It constitutes a point of reference less problematic than the sleep of reason or the limitation of our abilities to treat information, which take for proven that which still needs to be proven. In any case, it implies that the new magical thought, much like art actually, corresponds much better to the representations and the values of the individual than the science which reasons and predicts most of all the collective.

7. Some new arguments in favour of the explanation put forward My interest in the new magical thought comes from Denise Jodelet’s (1989) studies, which shed light on the idea of contagion in conditions where it is impossible. I offer this hypothesis to understand its meaning under other circumstances. But since then, how many times have I not wondered about its links to similar phenomena observed in the laboratory? Does one have to admit that not only are the biases and illusions so often described due to this social representation, but also that one can determine in what manner? This is certainly possible through an anchoring process of the representation of whose importance we know (Moscovici, 1961), and that the works of Doise (1978) help to understand even further. But I would stop at this interrogation had a recent article by the Polish psychologist Lewicka (1989) not come to provide the missing link. She offers a general interpretation of these biases and illusions. By a happy coincidence, she sees in it the effects of the anchoring of the mental operations which individuals perform. In fact, there are two anchorages possible, in the object or in the subject. Both ways of thinking oppose each other: While one gathers information, the other one processes the information according to its desires and opinions. Each pursues its cognitive work, described by Lewicka (1989) in the following terms: That is why the cognitive acts of an individual are either anchored in the object of the cognition, leading thus to a realistic evaluation of its properties, or in the subject, favouring the liberty to construct diverse interpretations. Both types of anchorage might correspond to a difference in the cognitive perspective that a subject can take: the objective, external anchorage, would be underlying to the perspective of an observer, whilst the subjective, internal anchorage would be that of an actor. (p. 286)

Where can one find the reason why someone leans towards one or the other? According to the proposed hypothesis, the social representation centred on the individual would tend to favour the subjective anchorage. It imposes on everyone to define himself or herself, to be responsible for his or her choices, to behave under all circumstances like the author of his or her acts and to express a point of view to his or her own. It is the idea of engagement (Beauvois and Joule, 1981), if one will,


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which would have a common request as an efficient source, or to express it differently, an engagement in regard to one’s self which derives from what one shares with others. […] To symbolise a step, one can summarise what precedes by saying that we have two series of implications: (a) deductive ones, which seek to establish if a hypothesis is sufficient by considering the positive evidence in order to predict a result, and (b) the others deductive which offer to establish whether a hypothesis is necessary to explain an event or a fact, in relation to negative effects. And, according to Lewicka, the attitude taken by people in experimental tasks – also in everyday life, I would add – corresponds to a subjective anchorage. So that, by adopting the perspective of an actor rather than an observer, they take much more interest in the sufficient conditions than in the necessary conditions of their inferences. In this sense, one could say that they seek to confirm a hypothetical representation rather than to assert it. […] Several examples analysed in the same manner lead to the same conclusion. The motive that leads individuals to such biases of judgement is rather different to the one invoked normally. It is not a limitation of the mental ability, but the fact that they identify themselves as actors. Or rather, the fact of anchoring the representation of a problem and the information received in the point of view of a subject, thus giving greater importance to the facts and events which constitute positive evidence. It is as if, in those conditions, one did not wonder whether there is another hypothesis which could provide the same evidence, and as if one did not look for different reasons to support the data of the information. Once the hypothesis has been found and one is convinced that it is sufficient, it appears less important to ensure that it is simultaneously necessary. For example, a doctor who knows a treatment to cure a certain disease will not rush to look for another method, perhaps better but uncertain, leading to the same result. It is the common tendency in all of us to not devote useless efforts to the quest of perhaps, but not necessarily, better means to accomplish what has already been obtained via simpler means. Very naturally, one tells oneself, ‘Since no one asks, observations and arguments in support, to question the hypothesis on such and such issue, I will do as if its correspondence to facts was perfect, and as if it were the only possible hypothesis’. There is nothing more to look for, nor to add. But let us come back on the meaning of these analyses in relation to what precedes. There would first seem to be two forms of knowledge and judgement. One starts from hypothesis and moves towards results, objects; the other goes back from these objects or results to the hypothesis – on this, all agree, when we think, it is rare, if not impossible, to make use of both opposite implications. In one case, one establishes what is sufficient to believe in the hypothesis, and, in the other case, what is necessary to account for a problem posed to us by exterior events or objects. We cannot deal with both cases at the same time without changing point of view or approach. Their opposition does not stop here. Behind the quest for the information likely to ensure that a hypothesis is sufficient there, one can guess the outline of something essential. I am talking about those assurances, of those intellectual means which give us the possibility of forecasting and predicting. While, to obtain the certainty in terms of facts and events, to ensure their necessary condition, the hypothesis must explain them. Forecast and prediction, which dominate everywhere in mental activity, come from those two crossed implications, one of which mimics deduction, and the other induction. One would not need to go any further, as this suffices to distinguish magic, which adopts primordially deductive implications to reach its goal, to predict, from science, which is inclined towards inductive implications to explain. In reality, it would be more accurate to say that the mission of magical thought is to explain what it predicts, and that of scientific thought to predict what it explains, given how linked the two ends of knowledge are, though opposite priorities are followed by magic and science, respectively. But never mind.


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One must go further and take a look at evidence and information. There is a further distinction between those that a group or person classifies as positive and negative. What does the theory and experience that come from common sense have to tell us about this? Each one of us has a preconceived idea, a prejudice towards what attracts and what disgusts him or her, what reassures and what threatens him or her. And positive information, positive evidence more easily trigger ‘deductive’ implications, and negative evidence lead more easily to ‘inductive’ implications. One seeks to confirm one’s hypotheses in order to reassure oneself, and one tolerates facts likely to reject those in order to put these hypotheses to the test, just like one pulls on a rope to see if it will hold. But to whom is convinced of his or her ideas, of his or her prejudices, no concern remains for such facts, even if this for the wrong reasons. Thus, if magical thought has a preference for positive proof, it is, as Mauss claimed, because it has faith in its representations and beliefs, in its formulas that decide what may serve as acceptable evidence to support those. Surely there is some false modesty in the claim by scientific thought that it doubts, but it does help to cool its attitude in the face of reality. […] But, besides those external aspects of the difference between the two forms of knowledge and implication, there are others that seem to pertain to the inside. What is the cause of this? It is what each one indicates through the use of expressions such as ‘me’ and ‘I’. It would appear indeed that the choice of the one or the other happens depending on whether the anchoring movement is made towards the subject or the object. More precisely, a mental operation is always anchored in the antecedent of the implication treated. In the first case, the act of judging or of representing is anchored in the hypothesis which the person holds; in the second case, the judgement is anchored in the available evidence. Thus, the research for the conditions in which one can confirm in a sufficient manner one’s hypothesis is an integral part of the cognitive attitude of an actor, while the research for the necessary conditions of its truth is an integral part of the attitude of an observer. This latter attitude is considered normal and deemed exemplary of a reason capable of correctly seizing the problems which an individual must face. Let me slightly shift Lewicka’s ideas to bring them closer to psychological truth. I want to say that the first anchorage involves each and everyone in the representation or the hypothesis, and makes them more relevant for one’s self. One feels involved in the act of judging and its outcome, while the anchorage in the object generates a distance and distanciates us from both our own hypothesis and the verdict which our judgement reaches. Of course, we become successively actor and observers. But this would be little, if the anchoring did not determine in the last instance a relationship to reality which is not the same for the former and the latter, a closer or more distanciated relationship, which makes us short-sighted or long-sighted. It is because our involvement is multiple that we feel this attraction for all that is positive, or on the contrary repulsion or interest for all that is negative. With little involvement, one enters without fear a domain where one constantly encounters the danger of seeing one’s beliefs and representations be shaken. The ‘I’ or the ‘me’ are not involved, and hence this assurance mentioned by the mathematician Sophie Kowalesky: ‘There are no words to describe the sweetness of feeling that such a world exists where there ‘me’ is completely absent’. This expresses utter detachment. Not so much the will to observe what is available to the senses, but rather the need to distanciate oneself from any kind of egotism. And there is no doubt, that if the me gains substance here and there, it largely depends on the social representation which does or does not put the individual at the centre, and further, the anchorage on the subject in everyday life or the object in scientific research for example. To those who defend that this dependence towards shared representations is an illusion falls the burden of providing evidence. And they prove no such thing, as they extend to the domain of social psychology notions proven in cases where society does not at stake. I will not go into the in-depth analysis of


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this point. I would simply like to remind that after having indicated the role of such individualistic representations, we now know that they trigger a particular form of knowledge and judgement, responsible for the so-called biases and errors. One thus manages to see that they are unavoidable as much from the standpoint of the content as from that of the logic, and to explain why. Thus, the theory of social representations defines the processes responsible for the order which exists between mental operations that cognitive theory describes, just like sense introduces an order within the sounds which could compose a word. Therefore, thanks to the to and fro between the two theories, one more explicative and the other more descriptive, we would reach convergences on well-defined problems. And, as we have seen, we would obtain a more appropriate vision of what magic is and would understand what makes it possible, at a time when all should exclude it. […]

8. Aphasia or cognitive polyphasia The problem of the new magic only bothers some particularly sceptical minds, revolted by the way people practice it or make do with it. They declare it suspect, they accuse it and hold it accountable in the name of science, without much success. But this problem interests the social psychologist because of its consequences in social life, the aspects of our thought and behaviour it reveals. I have attempted to approach it, by showing in what way the theory of social representations allows to give it meaning, and in this way to account for the biases and errors associated with this thought and behaviour. As we all have an extensive experience of these lapses of reason, it appears they are mostly due to the representations we share and the way we use ordinarily them. Just as disease is not an absence of health, but a reality as autonomous and positive as health, equally biases and errors are not failures of reason, but the indication of a mental life in its own right. It would therefore be a shame, as is done, to not go further to see how much these biases participate of a coherent system. At the least, of the possibility of bypassing reason, not in an arbitrary manner, but when the need to do so arises. Numerous elaborate and ingenious researches would lead to conclusion of general reach, which is at present not the case. However, if, as I have assumed throughout this work, new magic is not a failing thought but a thought other than that of science, both thoughts are in conflict, while one reaches beyond the limits of the real, the other only bothers with it. And, in fact, everyone, or almost everyone, makes them dialogue or face one another in themselves. On this occasion, one sees at work an enigmatic ability to be able to use radically opposed modes of intelligence. On this topic, I have previously mentioned cognitive polyphasia (Moscovici, 1961), the power which we have to play various keys of the mental organ. It is so much an issue of choosing the right keyboard, by leaving aside that which is not, as it is a matter of changing the links between them and to elect the domain in which each is the most efficient. Thus, in the third surrealist manifest, André Breton wrote, The universality of intelligence probably never having been given to humanity and the handing down to him of the universality of knowledge having at least been stopped, it seems appropriate to emit reserves on the pretension that man might have to the genius of settling questions beyond his field of investigation, and thus exceeding his competence. The great mathematician shows no grandeur in the act of putting on his slippers and of being swallowed up by his newspaper … There are no human shoulders on which to rest omniscience.

One must therefore take into account at least two modes of thinking, which are opposed in each individual and in society, be it primitive or modern. It is because social psychology is dominated


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by an instrumental attitude that the power of cognitive polyphasia has not been recognised by it. Were it less biased in its direction, it would wonder not what differences exist between the normal mode of knowing and the biased one, nor how to lose this bias, but what the mutual links between at least these two modes of thought are, and what social consequences these lead to. I by the way recognise that this would be a difficult task. But one could say the same of any task that our science has set itself. But let us leave these points of criticism. Is it vain to want to discover, through the phenomenon of the new magical thought, so widespread in our age, the mortal relationship that the different thoughts have, and to want to understand them in a new fashion? Surely, one will not need to look very far to discover the first symptoms. Let us open a newspaper, disconcerting news jump out: shattering news of a memory of water, the launch of the Ariane rocket, daily horoscope, and even an old acquaintance under a modern disguise, the rain maker. The latter comes from Switzerland (La Tribune de Genève, 6/7 July 1991) and pretends that by vaporising salted water in the atmosphere, the humid air will be carried by the wind to the drier zones, where rain shall start to fall. The authorities of its country refuse it the right to work in India, fearing discredit. They therefore must believe in it at least somewhat? All this surprising information is shuffled and mixed at wish by specialists, with copious amounts of pictures. The most elementary scientific notions are compacted in an alloy where they merge with others which aren’t, or are even the radical opposite. The communicative effort which drives them, our long habit of them succeeds in dissimulating what is unique and strange about those mental materials. But, instead of wondering about their incongruity and their biases, about their bad comprehension, should we not marvel at the ability with which each one seizes and immediately understands them? Acknowledgement This article was translated by Valerie Hartwich and abridged by Nikos Kalampalikis. The original article was published in French in the Bulletin de Psychologie, 1992 XLV(405), 301-324. This article is reproduced with kind permission of the author and the Bulletin de Psychologie.

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

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Author biography Author of major innovative works for social psychology, history of science, political ecology, Serge Moscovici is considered one of the world’s most influential theorists of social psychology. Professor at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, he is the Honorary President of the Serge Moscovici Global Network (REMOSCO) as part of the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris. He published recently two books (Reason and Cultures, 2012 ; The Scandal of Social Thought, 2013), both in the Editions of the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris.


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