Causal reasoning and behaviour in children and adults in a technologically advanced society: Are we still prepared to believe in magic and animism?

As a result of the growing fascination of psychology in the 20th century with a scientific model of reality, the human mind came to be viewed as an ‘organically rational’ construct whose fundamental features and the final point of development are based on the picture of the universe created by science over the last three centuries. Even the mind of a child has increasingly been presented as a mind of a ‘little scientist’ who is capable of grasping fundamental rational structures of the world nearly from birth (Bower, 1974; Gelman & Baillargeon, 1983). ‘Rationalisation’ of this kind can indeed be helpful, especially with regard to some studies of cognitive development in infancy, but it can create a distorted image of the human mind if developed in a general model destined to present the ‘true’ vision of the mind.