Can positive magical intervention affect subjective experiences? Adults’

reactions to white magic

Eugene Subbotsky

Psychology Department

Lancaster University, UK

Aims

It was reported that when a positive magical intervention that aimed to improve participants’ lives was presented as a hypothetical opportunity, about 50% of undergraduates were ready to accept (Subbotsky, 2005).

But would participants be ready to accept the offer of magical intervention if this offer were real and not imaginary?

Would participants who accepted the offer of magical intervention experience real or imaginary benefit if such magical intervention were indeed executed?

What can be expected

Improvement: Participants’ implicit beliefs in magic will make them feel that magical intervention did indeed produce positive changes in their lives.

Indifference: Being explicitly sceptical towards magic, participants will remain unimpressed by magical intervention.

Deterioration: While explicitly accepting the offer of magical help, implicitly participants will be anxious about interfering with magic and actively resist the possibility that positive magic could really change their subjective experiences.

Finally, the above reactions (acknowledging a positive change, staying indifferent or resisting the change) can depend on the type of subjective reality that is targeted by magical intervention.

Experiment 1. The effect of magical suggestion on the “feedback-provided” subjective experience

Aim: to examine whether positive magical intervention can produce significant improvement in subjective reality that is closely linked to practical experience and can receive a direct feedback from this experience.

Accordingly, participants’ estimates of their improvement on practical skills were targeted by magical intervention.

Procedure

The pre-test interview targeted participants’ understanding of the difference between magical events that violated known physical principles and tricks that looked like magical events but were open to non-magical (e.g., physical) explanations.

The aim of the interview was to prime participants to the purpose of the main interview: to affect their subjective experiences by magical intervention

Main interview

Participants were asked to pick up a practical goal on which they would like to have an improvement (such as speaking foreign languages, writing essays, giving up some bad habits)

And then offered a magical spell that aimed to help them to have an improvement in 2 weeks

They were then informed that they were free to decline the offer with no consequences to themselves or to the experiment.

If participants accepted the offer, they were invited to join the experimenter in placing their hands on the ‘magical object’, and the experimenter loudly chanted the magic spell.

Scoring

Participants were asked to contact the experimenter via e-mail in two weeks after the initial interviews and assess their improvement in achieving the chosen goals on the scale between zero (no improvement) and 3 (big improvement).

Control conditions

Ordinary suggestion: instead of offering a magical help, the experimenter said “You know, sometimes if you think or talk about improving on your chosen goals, you might be more likely to really improve on these goals”.

The aim of this condition was to find out if ordinary suggestion would produce the same effect as magical suggestion.

No-suggestion condition: following the questioning participants concerning their goals, they were thanked and told, “It’s nice to have goals”.

Design

Condition (3: magical, ordinary and no-suggestion) with improvement scores as a dependent variable

ResultsFigure 1. Per cent of participants who reported a

zero progress on their chosen goals in the magical, ordinary and no suggestion conditions

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

Magical Ordinary No

Interpretation Explanation 1 (fear of cost): participants may have wanted to assure

themselves that the services failed and therefore denied the progress Explanation 2 (inflated expectations): Instead of producing fear of the magical

intervention, the implicit belief in magic may have inflated the participants’ expectations of their progress beyond average.

As soon as the nature of subjective experience targeted in this experiment (improvement of practical skills) allowed participants to easily check whether the improvement has really happened, in two weeks’ time the progress should have been a lot smaller than the one expected to happen with the assistance of magic.

For instance, if the desired effect was to quit smoking, then in two weeks’ time participants hoped to completely stop smoking, but in reality they could keep smoking occasionally.

When the miracle did not happen, participants were disappointed and, instead of appreciating a slight improvement that occurred due to their own effort, they felt like they had no improvement at all.

Experiment 2. The effect of magical intervention on the “feedback free” subjective experience

In order to examine the alternative explanation, the “feedback free” subjective experience should be affected that does not allow a straight comparison between the effect expected and the effect achieved.

If the “inflated expectations and disappointment” explanation were correct, then, with other conditions being equal, in regard to the “feedback free” subjective experience participants would not show the detrimental effect of magical suggestion.

Rather, a positive, incremental effect of magical intervention should be expected.

If, however, the “protection from the magical impact” explanation is correct, then the detrimental effect of magical intervention should be replicated in regard to the “feedback free” subjective experience.

Procedure Like in Experiment 1, with 2 differences. Participants were asked to assess their general satisfaction with their lives (how confident they

were in themselves, to what extent their life was interesting and exiting, to what extent they enjoyed their lives).

Second, in order to allow for the possibility of satisfaction with their lives becoming worse, as well as better, a one-sided assessment scale used in Experiment 1 was replaced with a two-sided scale in Experiment 2. Participants were asked to assess satisfaction with their lives on the scale between 0 (extreme dissatisfaction) and 10 (extreme satisfaction) twice: first, during the experiment, and then in 2 weeks time, by contacting the experimenter via e-mail.

Participants’ satisfaction with their lives was chosen because this type of subjective experience is relatively “feedback free”. Indeed, if participants estimated their general satisfaction with their lives by a certain score (for instance, a score of 6), then in two weeks time they could change this score up or down even without any real changes happening in their lives, because participants’ feelings of satisfaction with their lives are their subjective attitudes and do not necessarily reflect objective reality.

For instance, a person could feel much more or less satisfied with his or her life today than he or she felt yesterday simply because a change in the weather, mood, health and other situational factors.

Design

Condition (4: help declined, magical-, ordinary- and no-suggestion) x Time of assessment (immediate and in two weeks), with satisfaction scores as a dependent variable

ResultsFigure 2. Mean scores of participants' feelings of satisfaction with their lives in Experiment 2, as a function of condition (help declined, magical-, ordinary- and no-suggestion) and time of assessment

(immediate and two weeks after)

0

2

4

6

8

10

declined magical ordinary no

Condition

ScoreImmediate

Two weeks after

Discussion The results supported the “protection from the magical impact”

explanation of the detrimental effect of magical intervention in Experiment 1.

As this explanation predicted, in the magical-suggestion condition of this experiment participants reported a significant decrease in their assessments of satisfaction with their lives, whereas in the ordinary- and no-suggestion conditions there was no change in participants’ reports in a two-weeks’ time.

In the “help declined” condition, participants’ estimates of satisfaction with their lives significantly increased, and this also is in concordance with the “protection from the magical impact” explanation.

Problem

But was the detrimental effect of the magical intervention a result of participants’ conscious decision to break away with the magical help, or was this effect a result of implicit work of the mind?

One way of examining this is to target a subjective experience on which the detrimental effect could show in the way inaccessible for conscious manipulation with data.

In order to answer this question, in Experiment 3 participants’ dreams were subjected to positively aimed magical intervention.

Experiment 3. The effect of magical suggestion on the “control free” subjective experience.

The procedure was as in Experiment 2, with the exception that, instead of assessing their feeling of satisfaction with their lives, participants were asked to report dreams that they saw in the three consecutive nights after the experiment.

They were first asked to choose a dream they would like to see that night, and then offered a magic spell that aimed to help them see their chosen dream in the following three nights.

Participants were then given a letter in which they were asked to describe the dreams that they saw, each morning after each of the following three nights. They were then asked to return the letter to the experimenter, via post or e-mail.

In the no-suggestion condition, after participants identified the dreams they wanted to see, they were simply asked to report their dreams like

in the magical-suggestion condition.

Dreams classification

Dreams were classified into the following three categories: target dreams, scary dreams, and ordinary dreams.

Target dreams were dreams that participants set up for seeing the nights that followed the experiment.

Scary dreams were dreams that contained a threat for the dreamer’s life, health or destiny.

Ordinary dreams were dreams that reflected everyday life, family or university events

Expectations If the detrimental effect of magical intervention were a result of

participants’ conscious manipulation with their reports, then in this experiment this effect would show in participants’ withholding their memories of having seen their target dreams in the magical-suggestion condition, but not in the no-suggestion condition. This should result in participants’ reporting seeing their target dreams in the magical-suggestion condition less frequently than in the no-suggestion condition.

However, if participants implicitly feared that magical intervention might indeed make them see their target dreams and wanted intervention to fail, then this may result in seeing dreams that are at the opposite end of the scale from the target dreams – unwanted scary dreams. Importantly, the latter effect, if it happened, would be beyond participants’ conscious control.

Results

0

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Target Scary Ordinary

Percent of dreams seen in Experiment 3, as a function of condition

Magical suggestionNo suggestion

Conclusions so far

In Experiments 1 and 2 the detrimental effect showed in the systematic underestimation of the desired positive effects of magical intervention, and in Experiment 3 – in seeing undesirable dreams.

Interestingly, the offer of magical intervention did produce a positive effect (significantly increasing participants’ reported feelings of satisfaction with their lives in Experiment 2), but only in those participants who declined the offer and were, therefore, free from the fear of magical intervention. The question arises of what causes this fear?

A possible answer is to assume that participants viewed magical intervention as violating authenticity and permanence of their subjective experiences.

Another explanation is that the fear of magical intervention is driven by the expected cost to be paid for magical favours.

Experiment 4

One way of assessing plausibility of the “protection of authenticity” explanation is examining if participants view magical intervention equally effective at changing real physical objects and their perception of these objects.

If the detrimental effect of magical intervention is a result of participants’ tendency to maintain authenticity and permanence of their subjective experiences, then the participants should resist magical intervention aimed at changing their perceptual images of physical objects to the same (or a significantly larger) extent than the magical intervention aimed at changing real physical objects.

To examine this, Experiment 4 was conducted.

Procedure

Participants were shown an effect in which a magical intervention changed (a) a physical object in the empty box (e.g., a small white disc was converted in a large red rectangle), or (b) their perception of the physical object, whereas the object itself was told to remain unchanged

Another independent variable was the degree of change: small (only one feature of an object/perception of object changed), versus big (three features of an object/perception of an object) changed

The dependent variable was participants’ assessment of the degree with which they believed in the effect of magical intervention, between 0 (no belief) and 3 (strong belief)

ResultsFig. 3 Mean belief scores in Experiment 4, as a function of target (object vs. perception) and change (big vs.

small)

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

Object Perception

SmallBig

Discussion

Participants were more likely to admit that a magical intervention had changed real physical objects than that it had changed their perception of these objects.

The results supported the “maintaining permanence of subjective experiences” explanation of the detrimental effect of magical intervention.

General discussion In four experiments, adult participants resisted the possibility of a

positive magical intervention affecting their subjective experiences. This resistance took place regardless of the type of subjective

experience targeted by magical intervention: feedback-provided or feedback-free, consciously controlled or not controlled (Experiments 1 – 3).

When compared with resistance of real physical objects to magical intervention, participants’ subjective experiences proved to be significantly more resistant than real physical objects (Experiment 4).

On this ground, it can be assumed that a defence mechanism exists that protects participants’ subjective experiences against positive magical intervention.

The results of Experiment 3 also suggest that this defence mechanism works implicitly: explicitly, participants were accurately reporting dreams that they saw, yet the type of dreams they saw in the magical-suggestion condition was the opposite to the one magical intervention intended to make them see.

While the detrimental effect of positive magical intervention on participants’ subjective experiences may be a result of the implicit defence mechanism that protects participants’ subjective experiences, the proportion of participants who accepted the offer of magical intervention depended on the magnitude of benefit that magical intervention offered.

When the benefit was big (Experiment 2 of this study), the number of participants willing to accept the offer was at chance level, and when the benefit was small (in Experiment 1 and 3 of this study), numbers of participants who accepted the offer were significantly above chance.

This suggests that participants’ attitude towards positive magical intervention is complex: they are curious to experiment with the offer, and yet anxious that there might be a price to pay. As the potential “price” decreases, the number of those who go for the offer of positively aimed magical intervention increases.

Perspectives It would be important in further research to examine how strong the

defence mechanism is, and whether it is specific to adults or can also be found in children.

The work of this defence mechanism in clinical populations of participants

would also be important to examine. It may also be the case that in cultures that are more tolerant to magic,

participants will be more likely to react to positive magical intervention in a more inviting way.

In Western cultures, this defence mechanism can serve as a protective shield against misuses of magical intervention or similar types of suggestive influence (intrusive psychotherapeutic or religious practices). The fact that in Western countries some positive magical practices (mind reading, neutralising evil charms, fortune telling) persist (Luhrman, 1989) suggests that the defence mechanism could be overcome or even absent in certain individuals.