untiltheseashallfreethem:

Here’s a sorely underappreciated idea:

Humans are better at sensing whether something is working out in their favor than understanding why or how it’s working out.

For example, you don’t need to understand why it’s useful to welcome guests when they arrive (e.g. with a hug or a handshake) to appreciate that it’s a good idea. All you need to know is that it creates good warm fuzzy feelings when you do it, versus awkward vibes when you don’t.

These kinds of unjustified, “irrational,” black-box behaviors exist because of a simple fact of human psychology: Our brains were built to form quick, binary judgments about everything we encounter, i.e., a positive or negative valence (friend or foe, approach or avoid). Relative to these intuitive judgments, however, verbal explanations are relegated to the position of, quite literally, an afterthought. It’s simply more important for our brains to know what is good for us — so we can approach or avoid it, continue the practice or abandon it — than to know why.

Now, take this facility of ours (judgment without understanding), hitch it to the process of cultural evolution (copy what works, discard what doesn’t), crank it for a few generations, and out will pop a bunch of practices that do useful things, but which we don’t fully understand — i.e., rituals.

So if we don’t fully understand them, but they work anyway, rituals must feel like magic. This is the psychology behind Arthur C. Clarke’s famous third law:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

And here’s the behavioral analogue:

Any sufficiently opaque ritual is indistinguishable from magic.

“Magic,” says Bronislaw Malinowski, “is to be expected and generally to be found whenever man comes to an unbridgeable gap, a hiatus in his knowledge or in his powers of practical control, and yet has to continue in his pursuit.”