If adults talk about magic, maybe children are just playing along when asked to imagine magical things.47 After all, what else would we expect them to say if we tell them that we have hired a magician for their magical birthday party who is going to do magic tricks and that all the guests should come dressed as wizards or fairies? Our whole approach to young children is to emphasize magic as part of normal experience. Magic has lost its supernatural meaning.
The Russian psychologist Eugene Subbotsky revealed magical thinking in young children with a simple conjuring trick. He placed a stamp in a box, muttered magical words in his heavily accented Russian, and then opened the box to reveal a stamp cut in half48 Young children believed that it was the same stamp and that the Russian spell had cut it in half. Older nine-year-olds and adults always said that the stamp must have been switched, while younger children were more gullible. But are adults so sure about the world? Although they thought the whole charade was a trick, they were unwilling to put their passport or driver’s licence in Subbotsky’s box. They did not want to risk being wrong.
When the stakes are high, we are less certain of our reason. It would appear that, just like the killer’s cardigan, we consider potential costs and benefits when weighing up the possible unknown. This is why rational students are unhappy to sign a piece of paper selling their soul for real money49 Only one in five would put their signature to the contract, even though the form clearly stated that it was not legally binding. Rationally, we would expect them to have more courage in their conviction, like the atheist Gareth Malham, who sold his soul on eBay in 2002 to help pay off his £10,000 student debt. There again, his soul only went for a paltry £10, which hardly justified the effort.
Is it really so surprising that young children give magical explanations for conjuring tricks? Maybe they just use magic as the default explanation when they can’t figure something out. What we should find more remarkable is that children grow up in a world full of complex technologies and events that they cannot possibly understand and yet do not talk about them as magic. Remote controls operate machines from a distance. People can talk to others via little handheld boxes, and so on. The modern child is immersed in a world that would amaze and possibly frighten someone from before the scientific revolution. As Arthur C. Clarke pointed out, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’50 So why do children not call everything magic?
Young children may start off as Piaget described, with all sorts of magical misconceptions, but with experience older children become more savvy. Children appreciate that there are some things they know and others they do not. When they see something that violates what they expect, they are more suspicious. But it is not the supernatural thinking of young children that is so remarkable, but the supernatural beliefs of adults who should know better. With experience and understanding, supernatural thinking should decline in children, but there is a paradoxical increase in supernatural beliefs in some cultures. In societies where belief in the supernatural is the norm, it increasingly plays an explanatory role in adults’ reasoning. This is the effect of environment, and this is where religion wields its influence. For example, when the anthropologist Margaret Mead asked Samoan villagers to give an explanation for why a canoe might have broken its mooring in the night, children tended to give physical reasons, whereas adults were more likely to talk about hexes and witchcraft.51 That’s because the adults had become increasingly influenced by the context of culture.
In our culture in the West, most supernatural beliefs, such as those surveyed in the Gallup poll described in chapter 2, are regarded as questionable, even though the majority of people believe at least one. Adults may even deny supernatural beliefs but, as we noted earlier, so long as no one mentions the word ‘supernatural’, adults are quite happy to entertain notions of hidden patterns, forces, and essences. In the 1980s, researchers interviewing women in Manchester about their supernatural beliefs found that they had to drop the term ‘the supernatural’, as this was generally met with negative reactions.52 However, as soon as the term ‘the mysterious side of life’ was used, the interviewees showed decided interest and were eager to talk. These women, mostly retired, happily went on to recount multiple experiences of ghosts, precognition, and feeling the spirits of the dead. They regarded these experiences not as supernatural but rather as mysterious.
We have become increasingly aware that supernatural thinking is something to be embarrassed about. We may even hide our superstitious behaviour when there are others around. Three out of four adults will avoid walking under a ladder if they think they are unobserved.53 If they see another adult do it first, they are much more likely to walk under the ladder. If we do not think that we are being watched, we are more likely to act superstitiously. Students were even less likely to cheat when they were told casually that the exam room was said to be haunted.54
Children may not offer an imaginary pencil to an adult, but if left alone, they will check a previously empty box after they have been asked to imagine that it contains ice cream.55 Even though they know it is just a pretend game, they are still not certain that the ice cream did not somehow materialize inside the box. In another study, four-to six-year-olds were told about a magical box that could transform drawings into pictures.56 All children denied that such a magical transforming box was possible. However, several days later all of the children tried out the magical spell when left alone with the box and were clearly disappointed when they opened it to find the same drawing inside. This suggests that children do have some expectation of what is and is not possible but are open to the testimony of others. Here is where storytelling and the role of culture can influence children who are uncertain.
Children may not conjure up cookies, pencils, and imaginary friends, but that may be because they understand the limits of their own abilities. They may be less sure about the extraordinary power of others or mysterious magical boxes. This is where culture steps in to shape our beliefs. Again, others’ testimony becomes important in supporting supernaturalism, and this is particularly powerful on the playground. In one of the largest extensive surveys of beliefs, Peter and Iona Opie studied more than five thousand British children. Among the various playground activities of games and songs were a mixture of supernatural beliefs relating to oaths and superstitions. The Opies noted that children distinguished between superstitions that were ‘just for fun’ or ‘probably silly’ and others that were taken as given. Here the Opies noted the presence of the supersense in those practices that were unquestionably accepted:
Others, again, are practised because it is in the nature of children to be attracted by the mysterious: they appear to have an innate awareness that there is more to the ordering of fate than appears on the surface.57
The other remarkable finding was that children mostly shared the beliefs of their friends but as they became adolescents they increasingly took on the beliefs of their family and elders. The fragmented folklore of children gave way to the traditional beliefs of the culture as they became adults. This may partly explain the pattern of emerging religious beliefs that we saw in the last chapter, where seven-year-olds were mostly creationist in their understanding of the origins of life on earth but older children had started to migrate toward formal religious beliefs or scientific accounts, depending on the family environment.