Surprising, magical and miraculous turns of events: Children's reactions to violations of their early theories of mind and matter

Abstract

Two studies were conducted in an effort to better understand the role of magic in the mental lives of young persons. In both studies, subjects watched what appeared to be a direct violation of some law of physics to which they subscribe. By documenting subjects' reactions to these events we set out to determine whether young persons would undertake to discredit such trumped‐up evidence as ‘magical’. In Study 1, 30 preschoolers, aged 3–5 years, witnessed what appeared to be one solid object passing unhindered through a space already occupied by another solid object. While more than half of the subjects initially labelled the event ‘magical’, over the course of three trials almost all came to judge what they had seen to be ‘a trick’. In Study 2, older children, aged 9–13 years, were exposed to a series of demonstrations in which their understanding of the laws of conservation was challenged. This ‘false feedback’ was administered either by a magician, a psychologist or a ‘priest’. When tested seven to 10 days later, it was primarily the subjects in the magician condition who had begun to recuperate their earlier commitment to the laws of conservation. The results of these two studies suggest that young persons can make effective use of the concept of magic, but perhaps only ‘parlour magic’, as a way of mentally quarantining evidence that appears to contradict their emerging theories of mind and matter.