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Can you do that voodoo? Psychologist of Princeton University were testing ?magical thinking?

Study subjects: Doll produced pain

By Richard Morin

Washington Post

In the cauldron boil and bake;

Eye of newt and toe of frog,

Wool of bat and tongue of dog,

Adder?s fork and blind-worm?s sting,

Lizard?s leg and howlet?s wing,

For a charm of powerful trouble. ...

Forget eye of newt, the caldron and, for that matter, the witches. A team of psychologists has a new recipe for conjuring up a curse:

Take several dozen college-age men and women, a fake voodoo doll and an obnoxious man wearing a ?Stupid People Shouldn?t Breed? T-shirt. Mix them together in a Harvard University laboratory, and suddenly these young people seriously believe they might have cast a hex and given a headache to the disagreeable man.

It?s either groundbreaking social science or the best practical joke ever.

Psychologist Emily Pronin of Princeton University and her colleagues were testing ?magical thinking? ? the belief that we can influence events if we think hard about them beforehand.

Pronin recruited 36 students attending summer school at Harvard as well as other young people around Cambridge, Mass. Participants came individually to the lab and were told to wait. Also in the waiting area was a 22-year-old man who was secretly working with the researchers.

A test subject and the confederate were ushered into the lab and seated at a table in front of a handmade twig-and-cloth voodoo doll. The researcher told the pair they would be partners in a study of ?physical health symptoms that result from psychological factors ... in the context of Haitian voodoo.? Both partners were given a scholarly article on voodoo deaths to read.

There was another twist. The confederate dressed and behaved normally with half of the participants ? and very badly with the other half. He arrived 10 minutes late wearing the obnoxious T-shirt and muttered ?What?s the big deal?? when the experimenter welcomed him and said she was beginning to get worried. He tossed an extra copy of a consent form toward the trash can but missed and left it on the floor. And while they read the article, ?he slowly rotated his pen on the tabletop, making a noise just noticeable enough to be grating,? Pronin and her colleagues wrote in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The other participant was then assigned to play the ?witch doctor.? The man who was in cahoots played the victim and wrote his name on a slip of paper that was attached to the voodoo doll. The witch doctor and victim were then asked whether they had any of 26 physical symptoms, including runny nose, sore muscles and headache. With the witch doctor listening, the victim said he had no symptoms.

The person playing the witch doctor was then left alone, in some cases instructed to think negative thoughts about the victim. The victim was brought back into the room and watched as the witch doctor, again acting on instructions, stuck five pins into the voodoo doll. The victim was again asked whether he had any ailments. This time, he complained that he had a headache.

The participant playing the witch doctor left the room and completed a questionnaire asking whether he or she felt responsible for the victim?s headache. ?The participants led to generate evil thoughts about their victim were more likely than the neutral-thinking participants to believe that they caused his headache,? the researchers reported.

What?s more, these faux witch doctors felt no guilt about what they thought they had done. ?Perhaps participants saw the victim?s headache as a just reward for his unpleasant behavior,? they wrote.