I don’t know if you’ve been watching the news, but by my count there have been two
disasters lately.
Let’s all just chill out and wait for the third one we all know is coming.
Hi everyone, Julian here for DNews.
Have you ever noticed misfortune tends to come in groups of three?
Celebrity deaths, natural disasters, and personal problems all seem to come in triplicate.
Surely there must be a scientific explanation for the pattern.
Well there is.
And that explanation is: there is no pattern, it’s just you.
It’s not the universe ticking through some equation that occasionally spits out grief
in bunches, it’s that you want to see a pattern in random information.
The phenomenon is called apophenia, and humans are guilty of it all the time.
Part of the reason we’re the most dominant species on the planet is because we see patterns
and exploit them to our advantage.
That’s a great skill when it helps us derive some truth, and a real problem when it deludes
us.
The examples I like are math and astrology.
A mathematical equation is really just a description of a pattern and it can be used to accurately
predict a specific outcome.
Whereas astrology is combining random information into a perceived pattern and it only makes
vague predictions that can’t be tested.
So why is it that despite my insistence, I haven’t killed astrology yet?
Well the reason apophanies are so persistent is because of another human flaw: confirmation
bias.
We don’t just see patterns, we see the patterns we want, and we ignore information that doesn’t
obey our pet theory.
English psychologist Peter Wason first demonstrated this in the ‘60s with an experiment.
He told participants that the numbers 2, 4, and 6 satisfied some rule he had in mind,
and invited them to suggest three other numbers to try and figure out the rule.
Most people only gave even ascending numbers and when they were told those numbers followed
Wason’s rule, they concluded that was the pattern.
But it wasn’t, Wason’s only rule was the numbers had to increase, but they could be
even, odd, positive, negative, integers or fractions.
Most people didn’t suggest a pattern they thought might be wrong though, they only tested
answers they were already sure fit.
In other words, they only tried to confirm their bias.
Then there’s our affinity for the number three in western cultures: Christianity’s
deity comes in three forms, satisfying lists of examples have three things.
But numbers have different significances in different cultures.
In China the number four is bad luck because it sounds a lot like the word for death, and
that’s true in both mandarin and cantonese.
So some chinese hotels and hospitals don’t have floors or rooms labeled with numbers
ending in 4.
When you combine our western preference for trilogies with the human tendencies for apophenia
and confirmation bias, you get the belief that bad things come in threes.
The truth is bad things happen all the time.
Sometimes they come in threes, yes, but sometimes they come by themselves, or in twos or fives.
If your rules are loose enough you could correctly say that tragedy is constant.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
How tragic is that?
Notice in the intro I didn’t explicitly list what two disasters had just happened?
I figure you can watch this video at any time, and two recent events will immediately spring
to mind.
I know that’s not a cheerful thought but look at it this way: great things are happening
all the time too, the only reason you’re not hearing about it is because bad news drives
up ratings.
So when the universe dishes out bad luck on a personal or grand scale, do what you can
to make the situation better for yourself or those affected, and know that two more
probably aren’t around the corner just because of some mystical “rule of threes.”
Unfortunately at the time we shot this, there was a massive earthquake in Nepal.
I encourage you to do what you can to help, and if you want to learn more, Julia’s got
an explainer on the science of it here.
Are there any other superstitions you think are actually scientifically sound?
Let us know in the comments and I’ll see you next time on DNews.