Explaining Coincidences from a Cognitive Perspective

We have a pattern detection mechanism, which is essentially a method of spotting potentially relevant relations between events in the world that have the features of causality. That is, they come in pairs or as a series, that we perceive as ordered, and that we perceive as either close in time, in space, or both. These contingencies are key to learning about what regularities exist in the world—which is why you'll often hear researchers say that detecting patterns are critical to helping us to predict and control the things around us.

Why? Because once we spot a regularity, we learn something about what events go together (structure), and how likely they are to occur (probability). These are valuable sources of information to begin to navigate the world. This is also why our (and most animals') pattern detection mechanism is an essential part of learning, which is built around a representational structure of our cognition that organises the world in cause-effect relationships. Pattern detection is foundational to our cognition, without it we cannot figure out how to plan actions, make decisions, make inferences, interact with people, and everything else that we do.

How do coincidences fit into all this? Coincidences, as we define them (Johansen & Osman, 2015) are surprising low probability pattern repetitions that, at first glance appear to have all the key features of being causally structured, but that, when searching our mind, we fail to come up with a causal explanation, and so end up putting them down to chance.

What we (Osman, 2014; Johansen & Osman, 2015) have been able to show in our work is that there has been a fundamental problem in the way researchers have tried to make sense of coincidences and that hasn’t gotten us very far in understanding the psychology of coincidences. The sceptic (often psychologists, statisticians) is focused on characterising coincidences as the result of merely chance occurrences out in the world, that are then, through irrational cognitive biases, interpreted erroneously as meaningful, and even paranormal. The believer (some psychologists, psychanalysts, philosophers – biologists even!) treats coincidences as evidence for various mysterious hidden, often paranormal - but not exclusively, mechanisms operating in the world. For instance, to the extent that biases have any role to play, they might help account for a tendency for us to perceive low probability from a highly personalised point of view. That is, we like to see things in a way that increases the value and rarity of coincidental events that we personally experience, but it doesn’t explain how we experience them, and all the other components that make up the psychology of coincidences.

What we have done in our research is show that neither is a useful way to understand the processes that underlie how we detect, interpret and evaluate our coincidental experiences. Our third way takes a rationalist perspective, in which we show that coincidences are an inevitable consequence of the mind searching for casual structure in reality. Rather than making some value judgment about the content of the coincidences, which sceptic and believers do, we strip things back to their basics, by focusing on the cognitive processes themselves. Summarizing the best part of 10 years of work in our lab on this, in a nutshell, we propose that we have a contingency learning mechanism from which we detect patterns, these have the initial trappings of being causal, from which we then search through our mind to find a causal explanation for, and when we cannot we make an attribution that the events are the result of chance.

Let’s take a situation in which an individual has a dream about a crashing plane, and the next day avoids taking a plane that ends up crashing. The individual might interpret this through the lens of a paranormal explanation such as having a prophetic dream. On this account, this wasn’t actually a coincidence, because they are making a causal attribution by appealing to a paranormal explanation (a premonition). The tension here is that the sceptic classes this as evidence of irrational thinking, because the causal explanation isn’t scientifically plausible. The believer would argue that this provides evidence of mechanisms that can’t be accounted by current scientific frameworks. The interpretation of what is a coincidence is made dependent on a particular perspective, either sceptic or believer, which actually asserts an explanation about how the world works, but not how the mind works in experiencing coincidences.

We suggest something different. We look at the cognitive processes through examples that people volunteer as they seem them as coincidences (often through diary studies), and then focus on looking at the chance and causal judgments people make about them, without taking either a believer or sceptic approach. Our point is that, we can’t discover what the psychology of coincidences is if we spend most of our time trying to explain the content of coincidences, from the view of either sceptic or believer. The value of the content of coincidences is only useful on the basis of what the core features are that we typically see as causal features in our detection mechanism. This provides us the vital clues as to understanding the fundamentals of our cognition.