by MAGDA OSMAN
PHOTO/Pete Jelliffe/Flickr
While we can all agree coincidences have fascinated scholars and lay people alike, what they mean divides us into one of two camps: skeptics or believers. A believer thinks that coincidences are evidence of mysterious, hidden and possible paranormal causes. A skeptic will put coincidences down to statistical quirks that are more common than we tend to think.
As cognitive psychologists Mark Johansen at Cardiff University in the U.K. and I propose a third point of view, which we call the rationalist way. This position is discussed in my book Future-Minded (Palgrave Macmillan, March 2014), in which I argue that coincidences are the product of rational cognitive processes, and are an unavoidable result of our mind searching for causality in reality. Before discussing the details of this idea, let’s consider some of the general findings associated with research on coincidences.
What we know from research on coincidences is that the frequency of experiencing coincidences isn’t predicted by gender, age, occupation or level of education. This means that all of us have actually experienced many coincidences in our lives and will continue to experience them as we proceed through life.
Although experiencing frequent coincidences isn’t restricted to any particular group, the extent to which a person sees meaning in such events does vary by education level. For instance, Susan Jane Blackmore at the University of Plymouth and her colleagues have shown that people who tend to hold strong beliefs in the paranormal also tend not to be good at tests of probabilistic reasoning, or generating and spotting randomness in series of numbers. And a 2014 study by Robert Brotherton at Goldsmiths University of London and Christopher French at Goldsmiths University of London shows that people who hold strong beliefs in conspiracy theories tend to make more errors in understanding statistical concepts.
Scientific American for more