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Imagindi

Magical thinkingis not a problem

The problem begins when imagination stops asking questions. Imagination proposes; inquiry tests.

What if humanity's greatest intellectual obstacle is not our ability to imagine invisible forces, but our reluctance to question the explanations we build around them?

1A curious double standard

When someone blames an illness on witchcraft, or a misfortune on angry ancestors, we call it superstition. When someone credits a recovery to divine intervention, or reads a coincidence as a sign from God, we call it faith.

The underlying move is the same: an invisible agent is said to have shaped a visible event. So why does one explanation get dismissed while the other gets protected?

And why do some people assume magical thinking is mainly an African trait, as if Europe walked out of history already holding a microscope?

History tells a different story. In Enchanted Europe, historian Euan Cameron shows how deeply charms, divination, witchcraft and miracle beliefs ran through European life between 1250 and 1750. Christians argued fiercely among themselves over which spiritual practices were true faith and which were condemnable superstition.¹

Nor did that coexistence end with the Enlightenment. Matthews and colleagues examine how magic, religion and science continue to live side by side in contemporary societies, finding that people turn to magic when it offers something neither science nor religion provides.⁸

Magical thinking is not an African phenomenon. It is a human one, shaped everywhere by culture, history and circumstance.

That does not make every belief equally justified. It means our standards must apply consistently. A supernatural claim is not proven because it belongs to a prestigious religion, and a traditional belief is not disproven because it comes from outside a dominant scientific culture.

The right question is never who believes something. It is what justifies the belief.

2Imagination proposes, inquiry tests

To answer that, we have to begin with imagination itself, one of the most extraordinary things a mind can do. Imagination lets us picture what does not yet exist, rehearse futures that have not happened, and ask questions that reach past what we can see. Without it there would be no hypotheses, no blueprints, no mathematical conjectures, no novels, no inventions.

But imagination is generous. It will produce explanations whether or not they match reality. An illness becomes a curse. An economic collapse becomes a secret plot. A ritual becomes a guarantee of success.

Imagining these possibilities is not the problem. Trouble begins when imagining an explanation becomes indistinguishable from establishing it.

Notice the difference between two questions:

Could an invisible force be influencing this event?
What evidence would distinguish that possibility from the alternatives?

The first opens a possibility; the second opens an investigation.

Science does not ask us to stop imagining. It gives us methods for testing what we imagine. A hypothesis is not accepted because it feels satisfying, familiar or intuitive; it is weighed against evidence and rival explanations, and revised when the evidence disagrees.

Imagination generates possibilities. Critical inquiry tests them.

When the two work together, imagination expands our freedom. When imagination replaces inquiry, it builds a prison out of its own inventions.

So the useful question for any society is not whether it has imaginative or spiritual traditions. It is whether those traditions welcome curiosity, tolerate criticism, and let beliefs change when better explanations arrive.

3The leap from a belief to a population

Lose that distinction, and arguments about magical thinking can take a troubling turn: they stop criticizing particular beliefs and start passing verdicts on entire peoples.

The chain usually runs like this: a population holds supernatural beliefs; those beliefs prove inferior reasoning; inferior reasoning explains low intelligence-test scores; and the whole pattern is inherited biology. Every link in that chain is an assumption. Each needs its own evidence, and none is supplied.

We can criticize a belief without declaring its holders inferior. We can study educational inequality without blaming a population's genes. We can acknowledge real differences in test scores without pretending one explanation covers them all.

A cultural practice is not a genetic diagnosis, and a test score is not a complete portrait of a mind.

Consider a 2022 study by Judd, Sauce and Klingberg of 6,567 children aged nine to eleven. Schooling, socioeconomic status and genetic indicators each had independent associations with cognition, and schooling substantially improved measured intelligence.⁶

The second half of their title matters just as much: schooling neither lessened nor widened the effects of socioeconomics and genetics. These influences operate side by side. None cancels the others, and none explains everything alone.

There is a further distinction that is often blurred. What we learn about the heritability of intelligence within a population does not, on its own, explain average differences between populations. Geneticist Richard Lewontin made this point in 1970: a trait can be highly heritable within each of two groups while the gap between those groups is entirely environmental.⁷ Still less does within-group heritability justify attributing such gaps to racial genetics.

So the claim that Africans score lower on intelligence tests because they engage in magical thinking is not an established finding. At best it is a hypothesis awaiting careful research, reliable measurement, and the ruling-out of plausible alternatives.

Without that work, it is imagination that has stopped asking questions.

4What an intelligence test can and cannot tell us

Once that leap is made, the debate often hardens into a second claim: intelligence is almost entirely innate, so education can do little for someone who supposedly lacks the capacity. This quietly merges two different statements:

1. Intelligence is influenced by genetic differences.
2. Intelligence is therefore essentially fixed.

The first has strong scientific support. The second does not follow from it.

Heritability is a statistic about variation within a particular population under particular conditions. It does not tell us what share of any one person's intelligence comes from genes, and it does not tell us whether that intelligence can change.

Dickens and Flynn showed how large environmental effects on IQ can coexist with high heritability estimates.⁴ Genes and environment are not rival explanations competing for the same territory.

A well-built test gives useful information about particular abilities, such as reasoning, working memory, processing speed and acquired knowledge. Such tests can predict some educational and occupational outcomes, and help identify learning needs.

But no test is taken in a vacuum. Language, schooling, familiarity with the format, health, culture and economic circumstances all shape performance and how it is read. Grodsky, Warren and Felts describe how standardized testing interacts with unequal opportunities to learn, and can help reproduce the very inequalities it measures.⁵

Imagine two students facing the same unfamiliar problem. One has spent years with similar puzzles, reading widely and receiving instruction in the relevant techniques. The other has rarely met such tasks.

Their scores will probably differ, yet the score alone cannot say how much of that gap is prior learning, ability, familiarity, or some blend of all three. To find out, we need evidence, not assumption.

A test can measure a performance. It cannot, by itself, narrate the history of how that performance came to be.

5Belief is not the opposite of intelligence

If test scores cannot settle the matter, perhaps belief itself can. Can an intelligent person believe in magic? Many assume not, but the evidence is more interesting than that.

In 2022, Dean and colleagues reviewed 71 studies, involving 20,993 participants, on paranormal belief and cognitive function. The most consistent findings linked paranormal belief to more intuitive thinking and stronger confirmatory bias, and to weaker conditional reasoning and a poorer perception of randomness.²

Those associations are real, and should be stated plainly. But Dean's doctoral research, which built on the review, concluded that while most studies point to a negative relationship, the evidence does not convincingly show an overall cognitive deficit among believers.³ It also found the findings varied considerably from study to study.

And an association across groups is not a verdict on any individual believer, let alone on a whole people.

Intelligence, critical thinking and belief are related, but they are not the same thing. A brilliant mathematician may accept an unsupported claim outside her field. A highly educated man may weigh evidence selectively when a belief is bound up with identity, loyalty or faith. Meanwhile, someone with little formal schooling may show sharp practical judgment, deep curiosity and a fine eye for patterns.

None of this means cognitive ability is irrelevant. It means ability alone cannot guarantee that every belief a person holds is justified.

There is a difference between the capacity to reason and the willingness to reason consistently. A person can be clever enough to question someone else's beliefs while refusing to question their own.

That is not necessarily a failure of intelligence. It may be a failure of self-examination.

6The tribal mind: when belonging outweighs truth

If intelligence does not decide what we believe, belonging often does. None of us builds our ideas alone. We inherit languages, customs, religions, moral instincts, political loyalties and whole explanations of the world. These inheritances help us make sense of life and stay connected to the people we love. They can also become very hard to question.

When a belief is woven into family loyalty or community membership, challenging it can feel like challenging the people who taught it. So a person may defend a belief not because the evidence is convincing, but because letting go of it is socially or emotionally expensive.

This is not an African peculiarity. It appears in churches and mosques, in political movements and nationalist ideologies, in professions, and in scientific communities too.

One person defends a traditional explanation because it is familiar. Another defends an ideology because it defines who they are. A third dismisses an unconventional hypothesis because it threatens the professional consensus. These cases differ in evidential merit, but each asks the same question: how much does belonging shape what we allow ourselves to believe?

The real distinction is between having a cultural identity and being imprisoned by it. A culture can preserve valuable knowledge while letting its members question inherited explanations. A community can keep meaningful traditions while investigating whether particular claims are true.

Cultural continuity does not require intellectual stillness, and intellectual progress does not require abandoning every inheritance. What matters is whether beliefs stay open to examination.

We should also distrust the claim that an entire population is "unwilling to evolve." It simply swaps one sweeping explanation for another. It erases the variety within every society, and the work of African scientists, philosophers, engineers, educators and inventors who have challenged established assumptions.

The right unit of analysis is not a continent imagined as a single mind. It is the particular belief, institution, classroom or social pressure that either opens inquiry or shuts it down.

7Europe did not wake up rational

Europe's own history shows how slowly that grip loosens. Modern science grew out of long, tangled intellectual, institutional, technological and social change. It did not appear because Europeans carried a uniquely rational genetic makeup.

European history is full of pagan rites, Christian miracles, astrology, alchemy, witch trials and divination. As Cameron's work shows, the boundary between legitimate faith and condemned superstition was argued over for centuries, by theologians, scholars, rulers and ordinary believers alike.¹

That history clarifies a useful distinction. A believer may see a miracle as the work of divine agency. An investigator asks what can be observed, whether alternatives can be excluded, and whether a proposed mechanism can be tested. Both approaches can live within one person. But faith and science are not interchangeable systems of evidence.

An experience of divine intervention may be deeply meaningful to the person who lives it. Its meaning, however, does not turn a supernatural cause into a demonstrated fact. The same standard applies to claims about ancestors, spirits, saints and miracles.

This is not a demand that religion disappear before reasoning can flourish. It is a request that claims about the natural world be judged by the evidence for them.

The lesson is not that Europe became rational while Africa stayed magical. It is that scientific institutions were built over time, and supernatural belief has kept company with science throughout.

8The factory floor: why context matters

If belief and reason can share one history, can they share one workplace? It is sometimes said that magical thinking is harmless on a factory floor or in an office. That claim deserves a closer look.

People do perform complex work while holding supernatural beliefs. A technician can diagnose a faulty machine and trust in divine protection. An engineer can apply rigorous mathematics at work and consult faith at home. Practical skill, religious interpretation, scientific reasoning and everyday intuition can share one head.

So a supernatural belief does not, by itself, prove an inability to reason. But the opposite claim, that such belief never matters at work, is equally wrong. Imagine:

• A worker blames repeated machine failures on a curse and never looks for the mechanical fault.
• A manager trusts a ritual alone to stop an infectious disease and ignores medical advice.
• An organization refuses to review a safety procedure because its leaders treat criticism as spiritually dangerous.

In each case, the trouble is not that a belief exists. It is that an explanation has replaced an investigation that evidence-based methods could have carried out.

The same applies inside laboratories. An engineer who ignores measurements because of personal conviction makes a methodological error, whatever their culture or creed.

The real test of a belief is not whether someone holds it. It is what the belief allows them to discover and do, and what it prevents.

9The paradox of rational osmosis

Critics of magical thinking face a test of their own. There is an irony in the idea that some populations simply need to absorb rationality from more "advanced" societies. It assumes that exposure to a superior intellectual culture will automatically transform the minds that meet it. That assumption, too, deserves testing.

Knowledge does not pour cleanly from one mind into another. We interpret everything through prior experience, language, expectation and the frameworks we already hold.

And borrowing the vocabulary of science does not guarantee scientific reasoning. Someone can speak fluently about genetics while misunderstanding heritability. Someone can invoke quantum physics to dress up a spiritual claim. Someone can wield intelligence-test statistics to reach conclusions the data cannot support.

Scientific language can investigate reality, but it can just as easily disguise assumptions.

The person who blames every misfortune on witchcraft and the person who blames every social inequality on genetic inferiority seem to be opposites. Yet both may be making the same mistake: treating a preferred explanation as settled before investigating the alternatives. Their claims are not equally supported or equally harmful in every setting, but the lesson stands.

Rationality is not shown by the conclusions we prefer. It is shown by the standards of evidence we apply, including to ourselves.

10Innate or learned? The wrong question

That test applies with special force to the oldest argument of all: whether intelligence is born or made. One camp says it is largely innate and education cannot fundamentally change it. The other says differences in performance are entirely the product of schooling and circumstance. Neither captures the science.

Cognitive abilities are shaped by both genes and environment, and the balance shifts across populations, ages, abilities and conditions. Education can raise knowledge and measured performance, but it does not produce identical outcomes in every learner. Good teaching takes those differences seriously.

But recognizing differences is not the same as deciding in advance that a student, or a people, cannot grow. The evidence on schooling shows why that fatalism is misplaced: genetic influence is real, but it does not make education futile.^4,6

There is one more distinction worth holding onto. Learning a fact is not the same as learning how to investigate a fact. Memorizing an explanation is not the same as understanding the evidence behind it. A school system can transmit a great deal of information while giving students few chances to inquire for themselves.

So the question is not innate or acquired. It is how biology, experience, schools and social conditions work together, and how teaching can help each person develop what they have. That is a harder question than declaring intelligence fixed. It is also a far more useful one.

11Imagine a culture that questions without betrayal

If minds are shaped partly by the cultures around them, the deepest change may not be the disappearance of every supernatural belief. It may be a culture in which questioning a belief is no longer treated as betraying one's people.

Such a culture would ask four things of any belief: what is believed, why, what evidence supports it, and what follows when people act on it. It would remember that intelligence is not wisdom, information is not understanding, and confidence is not proof.

And above all, it would cultivate imagination: not as an escape from reality, but as the power to conceive alternatives to the explanations we already have. So let us imagine.

Imagine a student who asks why her textbook makes a particular claim, and instead of being punished for challenging authority, is guided toward the evidence and reasoning behind it.

Imagine a community that keeps its traditions while inviting its young people to discover which practices are beneficial, which are symbolic, and which make claims that need testing.

Imagine a scientist who knows that professional authority does not erase personal bias. Imagine a believer who can separate the personal meaning of faith from a claim that requires verification. Imagine an educated person who accepts the role of genetics without using it as an excuse to withhold opportunity.

None of this is guaranteed by imagination alone. It needs institutions, resources, discipline and environments where inquiry is safe. But imagination is where these possibilities begin. Inquiry is how we find out which of them are real.

When the mind stops asking questions

Magical thinking is not an African problem. Nor is it a sufficient explanation for differences in intelligence, schooling or scientific achievement. It is one expression of a universal human habit: building explanations for events that are uncertain, emotionally charged or hard to understand.

Sometimes those explanations are harmless, or symbolically rich. Sometimes they comfort us or hold communities together. And sometimes they make unsupported claims, or lead to decisions that cause real harm. Our task is to tell these apart.

The same discipline must govern how we talk about intelligence. Genes matter, but heritability is not destiny. Education raises performance, but it does not erase every difference. Tests tell us something, but not why a difference exists. And no credible argument about human development begins by declaring an entire population incapable of reason.

A person can be highly educated and incurious. A person can be brilliant and defend an unsupported belief. A society can celebrate science while punishing students who question authority. And a person can inherit a spiritual tradition while living by evidence, investigation and intellectual humility.

The line does not run between people who imagine and people who do not. It runs between imagination that stays open to correction and imagination that mistakes its own creations for reality.

A mind that cannot imagine stays confined to what already is. A mind that cannot question its imagination stays confined to what it has invented. Freedom requires both.

Imagination proposes. Inquiry tests.

Progress begins not when we stop imagining the invisible, but when we start investigating the gap between what we can imagine and what we have reason to believe.

References

1. Cameron, E. (2010). Enchanted Europe: Superstition, reason, and religion, 1250–1750. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199257829.001.0001 ↩↩
2. Dean, C. E., Akhtar, S., Gale, T. M., Irvine, K., Grohmann, D., & Laws, K. R. (2022). Paranormal beliefs and cognitive function: A systematic review and assessment of study quality across four decades of research. PLOS ONE, 17(5), e0267360. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267360 ↩
3. Dean, C. E. (2023). Exploring the association between paranormal beliefs and cognitive deficits [Doctoral thesis, University of Hertfordshire]. https://doi.org/10.18745/th.26479 ↩
4. Dickens, W. T., & Flynn, J. R. (2001). Heritability estimates versus large environmental effects: The IQ paradox resolved. Psychological Review, 108(2), 346–369. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.108.2.346 ↩↩
5. Grodsky, E., Warren, J. R., & Felts, E. (2008). Testing and social stratification in American education. Annual Review of Sociology, 34, 385–404. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.34.040507.134711 ↩
6. Judd, N., Sauce, B., & Klingberg, T. (2022). Schooling substantially improves intelligence, but neither lessens nor widens the impacts of socioeconomics and genetics. npj Science of Learning, 7, Article 33. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-022-00148-5 ↩↩
7. Lewontin, R. C. (1970). Race and intelligence. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 26(3), 2–8. https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.1970.11457774 ↩
8. Matthews, L. J., Hertzog, W. B., Kyritsis, T., & Kerber, R. (2023). Magic, religion, and science: Secularization trends and continued coexistence. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 62(1), 5–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12813 ↩

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