Magical Thinking as Causal-Distortion Wrong Attractor: Superstition, Obsessive Ritual, and the Cost of Spurious Control

This paper applies the Displacement Framework to magical thinking, analysing it as a wrong-attractor state in which spurious causal beliefs are maintained because they provide illusory control over anxiety-laden uncertainty. Using displacement cost D(ξ), accumulated displacement Φ, and basin geometry, we show how the displacement cost of tolerating uncertain causality is elevated while magical thinking reduces this cost through spurious agency.

Ritual escalation deepens the basin: each ritual performed reinforces both the belief and the anxiety it manages. OCD thought-action fusion is treated as the clinical extreme of this mechanism. Nine propositions characterise the spurious-control mechanism, ritual escalation, collective magical thinking, and return paths through ERP and ACT. Published as part of The Phronesis Issues preprint series.