Apophenia and Bad Things in 3's

I'm following up on yesterday's post, Why Do Things Come in Threes, in which I listed the expensive bad things besieging me recently.

It seems everyone subscribes to the theory that events occur in 3's. I wondered about that so I did a little research. Guess what? It's not really true. It's just urban myth or a superstition that has arisen over the years.

Why 3's

Scientists studied the idea that bad things come in threes, and they found that it's not true. What is true is that people look for patterns in random data. It's a way we have to create order out of disorder. In other words, it's a way we can comfort ourselves.

The tendency to do this is called apophenia which was first described in 1958 Klaus Conrad, a German psychologist and neuroscientist. He was studying the onset of schizophrenia in people who thought of the delusions they experienced as a kind of revelation.

Evolutionary Advantage

The article says, "...the ability for mentally healthy people to identify and exploit patterns in nature has given us a tremendous evolutionary advantage. Mathematics, for example, is a way of describing a pattern or event that occurs in nature. Astrology, on the other hand, applies patterns onto perceived events and makes vague predictions that are easily applied to a variety of different situations."

The reason people find it hard to discount astrology is because of another human flaw in perception: confirmation bias. That's the human tendency to selectively choose information that confirms one's beliefs and dismiss information that doesn't.

Cultural Bias of 3

The number 3 in Western culture is pervasive and is found everywhere.

You see it in many areas of life like religion, i.e., the Holy Trinity, in children's stories like The Three Pigs, and in literature—the three-act narrative structure in plays and books.

Bad things happen all the time. When they're significant—like the 3 expensive repairs we incurred over the last 3 months—we tend to see the events as "bad things come in 3's" because of apophenia, confirmation bias, and cultural bias.

Takeaway Truth

If you want to know more about this, read the excellent post on Do Bad Things Really Come in 3's?