Although the word magic is common in both scholarly and lay discourse, the variety of things to which it refers is far-reaching, ranging from a social institution characteristic of traditional societies, to sleight-of-hand or parlor tricks, to belief in unconventional phenomena such as UFOs and ESP, to sloppy thinking or false beliefs, and even to a state of romance, wonder, or the mysterious. One must at least entertain the possibility that there is no true category here at all. Instead, the term “magic” in current usage has become a label for a residual category – a garbage bin filled with various odds and ends that we do not otherwise know what to do with.

Yet to relegate “magic” to this status seems to us to be throwing out the baby with the bath water. Certain meaningful consistencies can be gleaned from a careful review of the historical and current approaches to magic, including our own recent empirical studies of “magical thinking.” We turn now to a review of these approaches, with an eye toward outlining a working definition of magic. This is followed by a review of our empirical studies to date and some speculations, based on current thinking in diverse fields, regarding the origins, functions, and implications of magical thinking.