Thought-Action Fusion

Thought-action fusion, abbreviated TAF, is the tendency for individuals to assume that certain thoughts either increase the likelihood that a catastrophic event will actually occur, a pattern researchers call likelihood-TAF, or reveal something immoral about the thinker's own character, a pattern called morality-TAF. The concept describes a biased and distressing fusion in a person's mind between their own spontaneous, unwanted thoughts and imagined desires or magical beliefs the person does not actually want or endorse, where those imagined desires or beliefs are experienced as expressing harmful actions, such as compulsions, that feel highly possible to the person even though they have never actually occurred. The pattern is closely associated with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive difficulties, in which an intrusive thought is treated as carrying real-world moral or predictive weight rather than being dismissed as an ordinary passing mental event.