Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception

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Jennifer A. Whitson and Adam D. Galinsky, Abstract: “”We present six experiments that tested whether lacking control increases illusory pattern perception, which we define as the identification of a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli. Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions. Additionally, we demonstrated that increased pattern perception has a motivational basis by measuring the need for structure directly and showing that the causal link between lack of control and illusory pattern perception is reduced by affirming the self. Although these many disparate forms of pattern perception are typically discussed as separate phenomena, the current results suggest that there is a common motive underlying them. (Science, 3 October 2008, Vol. 322. no. 5898, pp. 115 – 117)

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Years ago, there was a psychiatric paper I can no longer dig up proposing that belief in ESP was correlated with a history of sexual abuse and other trauma, the link being the experience of the lack of control in abuse. It is more comforting to believe that the skill to foresee, and potentially avoid, disastrous events exists (even if one failed dismally at foreseeing events in the abuse situation; one can believe in the possibility one may not fail the next time…) than to believe that no foresight is possible and that disastrous things defy our abilities to control them.

And on a cultural level, I recall being fascinated by attempts to explain ritual and religion as efforts to exert an illusory control over contingent events. (If we perform our rituals perfectly, the gods won’t send that famine. When it comes, it is because we were imperfect in our observance.)

So some distorted, “magical thinking” can come from experience, but it can also come from neurochemical imbalances or abnormalities of neural network formation, as in schizophrenia and other psychoses, especially of the paranoid type, in which too much credence is given to coincidence and patterns are found where there are none. And this amped-up ability to see patterns may not, of course, always work against one. A gifted few seem to have an enhanced ability to make order out of chaos, as per an article from New Scientist to which I blinked in March of 2002.

I have also written further about this on FmH in a discussion of pareidolia and apophenia which touched, among other things, upon William Gibson‘s preoccupations in the aptly-titled Pattern Recognition (2003).

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