Book Review: The Age of Magical Overthinking
Confession: I believe in the power of manifestation. Yes, I know it’s used by a lot of grifter types and is based in pseudoscience (if anything at all), but it seems to work for me and a lot of people I know. I am a critical thinker at heart, however, so when I come across anything on the topic - whether in support of it or debunking it - I give it a read. I came across Amanda Montell’s book, The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality, which promised to take on magical thinking or the “belief that one’s internal thoughts can affect unrelated events in the external world.”
Montell is the talented and relatable author of Wordslut and Cultish. Her writing is beautiful. It’s not often that reading for work brings me this much pleasure. She injects a lot of her own experiences as well as pop culture references into her exploration of the biases and heuristics that drive present-day thinking.
She tackles the halo effect, proportionality bias, sunk cost fallacy, zero-sum bias, survivorship bias, recency illusion, overconfidence bias, illusory truth effect, confirmation bias, and declinism, framing them in an accessible context. She describes the halo effect in terms of stan culture and the building up and tearing downs of celebrities like Taylor Swift. The overconfidence bias is illustrated with references to criminals and grifters like Elizabeth Holmes. She illustrates how zero-sum bias permeated the beauty business in which she was immersed in an earlier writing career: “There was a limited quantity of light in the universe, I was sure, and merely learning that someone else was burning bright dimmed me.” Her reference points are broad and the text is peppered with everything from Audre Lorde and Ursula Le Guin quotes to references to ChatGPT. The book feels like it’s both timeless and written this morning. Montell’s linguistic chops are on display throughout with punchy prose: the halo effect illustrates “the power of good lighting alone to influence perceptions.” Montell has done her research into the psychology behind these biases and why they permeate modern society. In her chapter on the halo effect, she observes that some of today’s existential malaise comes from the failure of trusted institutions and the fact that the stars will never live up to the parental/leadership figures we seek. The material goes beyond the typically sterile approach to cognitive bias.
Montell’s personal storytelling and vulnerability are what make this book so enjoyable and unique. She frames the sunk cost fallacy in terms of her own dysfunctional relationship with a toxic older boyfriend. She shows that we tend to stick with losing situations so “we don’t have to admit to ourselves that we made a bad bet and lost.” She layers in the additive solution bias to demonstrate where we’d rather solve a relationship problem by adding in elements like buying a home or going on vacation than subtracting an element via a break-up. This book is filled with memorable gems such as her conclusion that one needs to “build a life that’s so full, and so yours, that you never really sunk any costs at all.”
Some of the metaphors landed better than others. The author tackles manifestation in the context of proportionality bias, which is the instinctive “psychological craving for big events (and even big feelings) to have equally big causes.” She takes on a few of the manifestation folks in the pseudo-psychology space (the Manifestation Doctor is a thinly veiled description of someone whose books I’ve enjoyed but certainly I don’t take as gospel.) She posits that manifestation is mostly based on fantasy and is “often little more than a combination of proportionality bias, confirmation bias, and frequency bias.” I don’t disagree, but actually see this as a positive since we can use the power of the frequency bias to train our brains to look for opportunities in the same way that if I asked you to focus on white Teslas, you’d start to see more of them on the road. While she makes many compelling arguments in the book, I don’t think that the slope from believing in manifesting success to believing in QAnon’s theories is as slippery as she presents. She proposes that manifestation boils down to “if we’re primed to think that big events have big causes, and to hallucinate patterns everywhere we look, then of course we’ll believe the reason why failure no longer follows us is because we learned to control the fate of the universe.” Again, I don’t disagree, but don’t think this proves that magical thinking is so much irrational as wildly optimistic. As she readily admits: “Beliefs about yourself do influence outcomes. Spirituality is shown to increase resilience. You can alter your reaction to certain stressors.” Aha!
But, as she’d also likely point out, the fact that I cherry-picked the phrases that best support my view proves her point that these cognitive biases can undermine our ability to think critically about issues that run close to the bone.
I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 5/5