Yes, Terry, what you're referring to is called magical thinking.
The trouble is, humans are innately magical thinkers, at least until they reach an age where higher cognition develops sufficiently to dispel such ideas with better information but even that takes education. That starts happening around 2 or 3 years old, if I recall early childhood development.
I worked in preschool education for years...believe me, it's a stage of human development to be a magical thinker. That's why kids love magical stories even more than adults.
Babies do that all the time. Baby kicks legs, the mobile above the crib moves...baby starts to think maybe the pretty thing is moving and playing music because he kicks his legs...so when the baby wants to see and hear the mobile, he kicks...and sometimes, mom sees that as a signal that the baby wants her to wind up the mobile, so hey. presto, I made it move by kicking my legs, thinks baby.
That explains a lot of non-thinking stuff, as you say, being reactionary. But, it's also rather unavoidable unless you can explain to someone how the wind up motor on the mobile works, and maybe even have them do it themselves to make sure that's how it works. That's what we have parents who explain things to us and education for...simply observance and reaction to the world around us isn't always enough to figure things out, but it the BEGINNING of cognition.
It's where chimps are kind of stuck in their cognition skills, since they develop to about where a three year old does and then stop.
But, without something to replace that, we may continue to think the world is magical, at least to some extent. Adults with no access to more information or where no information is available will continue to think magically where something more factual hasn't been demonstrated or taught.
Fine for fictional purposes for entertainment, but not quite as useful for other aspects of life.
But, it's been postulated by evolutionary psychologists that at an earlier stage of hominid development we were magical or childlike thinkers all of our lives, and to some extent, we still are, that part of us doesn't disappear entirely. Hence religion and other supernatural beliefs, fiction and fantasy, creativity, all that stuff.
The Stone Age wasn't that long ago in evolutionary terms...in some important ways, we still have Stone Age brains, even though we live in a technologically advanced world.
