Magical Thinking

Magical thinking, also called superstitious thinking, is the belief that unrelated events are causally connected despite the absence of any plausible causal link between them, particularly where the presumed connection is attributed to a supernatural effect. Examples include the belief that a person's own thoughts can influence the external world without the person acting on those thoughts, or that two objects must be causally connected merely because they resemble each other or have previously come into physical contact. Magical thinking is a form of fallacious reasoning and a common source of invalid causal inferences, and unlike the simple confusion of correlation with causation, it can occur even where no statistical connection between the two events exists at all; in psychology specifically, magical thinking is the belief that one's own thoughts alone can bring about effects in the world, or that thinking about doing something is equivalent to actually doing it, a belief that can produce an irrational fear of performing certain acts or even having certain thoughts because of an assumed link between doing so and some threatened calamity.