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Behaviorism
What Do We Make of Surprising Coincidences?
Perhaps coincidences don't necessarily portend consequential events.
Posted February 14, 2024 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Key points
- Our lives are filled with innumerable events that have nothing to do with one another.
- Yet, others intriguingly coincide. What are we to make of them?
- Prudence suggests we enjoy them and not invoke supernatural forces or conspiracy theories to explain them.
Our lives are brimming with innumerable events: some good, some bad, and most unremarkable. The vast majority of these diverse events have little or nothing to do with one another. Yet, there are times when, purely by chance, a rare few of those events intriguingly coincide. What are we to make of such fascinating cooccurrences? The answer, it turns out, may very well depend on the uniqueness of those juxtapositions and their relevance to us.
Let’s consider some of them to see what we might learn about the psychology of coincidence.
A marriage of divine design?
Elizabeth Christensen and Joshua Colbert were married on September 13, 2023. They had each divorced their prior spouses and had subsequently sought new romantic relationships. They connected in April of 2023 on the dating app Hinge. Then, as the duo explored their respective backgrounds, they discovered that both had grown up in Andover, Minnesota. Indeed, both had attended Northside Christian School and graduated in 1995. Looking through school photographs and videos, they also discovered that they had been students in the same kindergarten class. The two also shared the same birthday: September 13, 1988. On top of all those cooccurrences, they had been born only six hours apart in the same maternity ward at Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids.
How’s that for an astounding story? Nonetheless, despite the incalculably low odds of these striking coincidences, the couple offered a simple explanation: divine intervention had brought them together. This decidedly religious account should not be surprising given that Elizabeth’s father is a pastor who himself officiated the couple’s nuptials.
The serendipitous sandwich
A close friend shared this recent anecdote with me. A native Spaniard, who has lived many years in the States, noticed that Spain’s main newspaper, El País, had on February 6, 2024, quite prominently featured a popular local eatery in her hometown of Bilbao—El Eme sandwich shop. Excitedly, she phoned her mother in Spain to pass along the surprising news. Upon answering the phone, her mother replied that, at that very moment, she was in line to purchase a sandwich at that exact shop—and she emailed a photograph to prove it. What a laugh they both had
A most timely tune
Three members of my family were born in a single week in April: I was born on April 2, my mother was born on April 8, and my mother’s Uncle Harry was born on April 3. I usually have an enjoyable, but unexceptional birthday; however, I often have a bit of a letdown the next day because my memories of Uncle Harry are so sad. Uncle Harry was a commercial artist until he lost his eyesight. He then became destitute and moved into the shabby Baltimore Hotel on Los Angeles Street, where he subsisted on charity and secondhand clothing from family members. His hardscrabble life further worsened after he was struck by a car while attempting to cross the street. He later passed away in obscurity.
The morning of April 3, 2014, began as usual. I was exercising on the treadmill at my local club, halfheartedly watching the news, and again reminiscing about Uncle Harry. I needed a pick-me-up. I switched channels and found myself smack in the middle of a charming 1951 musical, “I'll See You in My Dreams,” with Doris Day and Danny Thomas. Within mere seconds of tuning into the movie, the principals were singing an upbeat song, “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” I pepped right up and thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the day.
The psychological impact of coincidence
At this point, you might well be wondering if I’m a bit transfixed by coincidences. I am. Perhaps the context for my frequently noting and occasionally recording coincidences is that I’ve been teaching the psychology of learning for over 50 years. Coincidence plays a key role in associative learning, whether we’re considering Pavlovian conditioning or operant conditioning. Famously, in operant conditioning, B. F. Skinner linked the origin of superstitious behaviors—whether in pigeons or people—with chance conjunctions of responses and consequences.
According to Skinner’s learning theory, mere temporal contiguity prompted his pigeons to repeatedly perform highly idiosyncratic responses despite there being no actual relation between these behaviors and the receipt of food—all that is necessary for operant conditioning to occur is that reinforcers closely follow responses. By this mechanism, Skinner proposed that his pigeons had come to behave as if there were a real causal connection, in much the same way as people behave when they futilely attempt to guide a bowling ball away from the gutter with the wave of the hand or when students insist on using a particular pen when taking a written examination.
Probably because of my well-known interest in superstitious behavior, on the morning of Friday, July 13, 1984, I was contacted by a local radio station and asked why people so often believe awful things are exceptionally likely to happen on Friday the thirteenth. I replied that this day is really no more likely to occasion terrible events than any other day. But, because of the popular cultural superstition, if something dreadful were to occur on that day, then people would be even more firmly convinced that this day is particularly fateful.
A different conclusion
That said, I must confess to having been quite shaken when later that very afternoon a tragic accident happened that took the lives of two family members of my secretary in the psychology department. Although that horrible coincidence is indelibly etched in my memory, I remain resistant to believing that fate was in any way involved. I do appreciate that, without my background in experimental psychology and probability theory, others might very well arrive at a different conclusion—much as had the newlyweds in the first vignette.
In this era of rampant conspiracy theories, we would all be well-advised to appreciate that coincidences do indeed occur—perhaps far more often than is commonly recognized. If we gloss over the majority of them because of their evident triviality, then only the most salient among them may be remembered and hence overvalued and over-interpreted. Paying much closer attention to the actual frequency of occurrence of coincidences would be especially prudent before invoking improbable conspiracies or supernatural forces lying behind them.
Let’s try not to fall prey to Yogi Berra’s wacky axiom: “That’s too coincidental to be a coincidence.”
