Accidents are random: a thought that many people find difficult

Accidents are random: a thought that many people find difficult to accept We are publishing an article by family psychologist Pavel Zygmantovich, explaining why it is so difficult for us to deal with randomness. Many people think that there is an invisible force around us that, for some reason, ties everything together into a single complex network. Simply put, people believe that accidents are not random, everything is interconnected, and if I forgot my umbrella at home today, it will definitely rain. To put it mildly, this is not true at all. Such conclusions stem from the biological human tendency to establish connections. This tendency is very useful on a concrete level (when it helps us understand that eating green fruit is dangerous for the stomach), but it often fails when we try to understand abstract concepts like economics, politics, or even the life of an ordinary person. Here’s a simple example — a textbook study. In 1965, William Ward and Herbert Jenkins gathered defenseless people and told them that they had been selected to evaluate the results of an experiment (made up, of course). The essence of the made-up experiment was as follows: for 50 days in one region of the USA, clouds were treated with special reagents to induce rain. The participants in the experiment (real) were asked to evaluate the effectiveness of the experiment with clouds (made up). The information about the treatment of clouds and the rain that fell was made up, as was the entire experiment; there was no cause-and-effect relationship between them. The scientists simply randomly selected days when the clouds were supposedly treated and days when it was supposedly raining. Moreover, the selection process was maximally “randomized” to make the selection truly random. Do you think it helped? Not at all! The subjects were very happy to find a connection between cloud processing and rain (made up, please remember!) In psychological science, such made up connections are called illusory connections or illusory correlations. People love to notice illusory correlations wherever they can reach. There have been many studies on this topic, and they all prove that if a person is convinced of the existence of a correlation (interconnection), he will find it. By hook or by crook, but he will find it! Here is another example. Edinburgh linguists led by Simon Kirby conducted an elegant experiment (Kirby et al. 2008). The legend was as follows: the subjects were asked to learn the language of aliens. The participants in the experiment were shown circles, squares and triangles of red, blue and black colors. These figures moved along different trajectories, spun, stopped, and so on. In addition to the figures, they also showed words that the aliens allegedly used to describe the figures and the type of movement. The subjects worked in “chains” of ten people. Each subsequent person received the results of the previous person’s work (and the very first person received words and images randomly synthesized by the computer). There were four such chains in total. What was the result? The same thing. People saw patterns in random coincidences, and each (each!) “chain” of ten people developed its own “alien” languages. In other words, people saw order where there was only chaos. Such is the inevitable human characteristic. It is important to know that we see connections especially well where we expect to see them. For example, you believe that buying oranges in a store causes the dollar to fall. In this case, the cognitive selection mechanism is automatically triggered — you will notice and remember only those cases of buying oranges that coincided with the fall in the dollar exchange rate. Only, I emphasize, these cases. The same with prophetic dreams. People remember only those dreams that coincided with reality. But if we looked at the statistics as a whole, we would see that “dreams come true” are the most striking example of an illusory connection. During their life, a person sees several million dreams, and at least five of them will coincide with reality. This is simply inevitable. The same with premonitions. Each of us has had ten thousand premonitions that did not come true. But we remember only those that come true. The same with the beloved “synchrony” - when we think about loved ones, and loved ones call us, for example. In these cases, we notice and remember only those cases when our thoughts coincided with a call from a loved one and lose sight of the whole host of cases when thoughts about a loved one were not accompanied by his call. So, coincidences are most often random. "Non-random coincidences" are most often just coincidences that we, under the influence of our desire to see order in everything, take for interconnected events. This is not fatal and not bad. This is our innate tendency, which often turns out to be useful. We just need to understand that in some cases such a tendency to illusory connections turns out to be useless and even harmful. And before believing in a correlation, it is worth checking whether it is illusory.