Everyday magical powers: The role of apparent mental causation in the overestimation of personal influence.

These studies examined whether having thoughts related to an event before it occurs leads people to infer that they caused the event--even when such causation might otherwise seem magical. In Study 1, people perceived that they had harmed another person via a voodoo hex. These perceptions were more likely among those who had first been induced to harbor evil thoughts about their victim. In Study 2, spectators of a peer's basketball-shooting...