Coincidence and Probability judgements

The role of coinidence
1. Illusion of causality: a coincidence is when two events happens at about the same time. People often assume that one causes the other. It might be that people who beleive in anomalous experience are more likely to think that such co-incidents have a causal link.
  1. Illusion of control- explanations for coincidence mean that people feel they control things, in fact, they have no control over. This illusion of control makes the world seem a more orderly place.
    1. General cognitive ability- or intellignece might be lowered in believers and therfore they are less able to accurately judge whether a paranormal event, in fact, has a normal explanation. Some research has found that beleivers have significantly lower levels of academic performance than scpetics. Research has also found that believers have significantly lower levels of academic performance than sceptics.
Evaluation
1. The illusion of causality may have adaptive significance- causal thinking evolved because it allows people to understand and control their environment. Foster and Kokko argue that the adaptive advantage will persist as long as the occasionally correct response has a large adaptive benefit.
2. Illusion of control- Brugger et al point out that the tendency to see things that arent there also has an adaptive advantage- it's always better to think you see a tiger that is hidden in the grassland than miss it. This ability may also underlie creativity. In fact researchers have found a link between creativity and paranormal beliefs. Thalbourne found that believers are more creative whereas non-beleivers are not and may even lose out because they fail to detect meaningful connections.
3. Illusion of control- this was supported in a study where illusion of control was experimentally manipulated. Whitson and Galinsky 2008 found that reduced control led participants to detect patterns where there were none and form illusory correlations between unrelated events.
4. General cognitive ability- the findings that poor cognitive ability is associated with paranormal experience/beleifs hasn't been confirmed in all studies. In fact some researchers have actually found the opposite. (Jones et al 1977) Surveys also suggest that even amongst the scientific community belief is high, for example readers of New Scientists said 67% regard ESP as established or likely possible.
The role of probability misjudgements.
1. Probability refers to the likelihood of an event occuring. Beleivers (sheep) may underestimate the probability that certain events may simply apply by chance, Therefore, they reject coincidence as an explanation for paranormal events and attribute causality when the facts are simply random.Blackmore and Troscianko suggested that paranormal experiences are a kind of cognitive illusion resulting from a failure to accurately judge prbability. To test this, researchers have used a variety of probabilistic reasoning tasks.
  1. Repetition avoidance- p's are asked to produce a string of random numbers and the number of repetitions is counted. In a true series of random numbers there are consecutive repetitions but people who underestimate probability are less likely to produce such repetitions. Brugger et al found that sheep avoid producing repetitions more than goats
  2. Questions about probability- Blackmore and Troscianko asked p's various questions including the chance of two people having the same birthday. More goats than sheep got this right when asked a multiple choice question containing the right answer of 23.
  3. Conjuction fallacy- Rogers et al 2009 tested probability judgement by giving p's 16 descriptions of occasions where two events co-occur, e.g. such as getting food poisoning after eating eggs. P's were asked to indicate the probability of such events co-occuring. Sheep made more conjuction errors than goats.
Evaluation
1. Thereiological support fro may be biological support for the tendancy to make connections that are not real. Brugger et al found that people with high levels of dopamine in their brain are more likely to find significance in coincidence, and pick out meaning where there is none. This might explain what sets believers apart from non-believers. In this study beleivers and non beleivers were briefly shown real and scrambled faces and real and made up words on a screen. The beleivers were more likely to see a face or word when there wasnt one, whereas the non-beleivers were more likely to miss a real face or word. Next the p's were given L-dopa which increases dopamine levels in the brain. Non-beleivers acted more like the beleivers but the drug had no effects on the beleivers.
Evaluation
1. Contrasting research evidence- Not all research found a difference between beleivers and non-beleivers in terms of their probability judgements. One reason for the different findings from various studies may lie in the way that beleif is determined, In many studies a general scale is used whereas in Blackmore's 1997 study there was simply one question aksed about whether the p beleived in ESP.
  1. Correlation is not a cause- the research evidence largely suggests that there is a link between probability misjudgement and paranormal beleifs, but such a link does not mean we are justified in concluding that difficultues in making appropriate judgements cause the paranormal beliefs. There may be a counfounding variable, such as cognitive ability.
    1. Cognitive ability- this may explain the link between probability misjudgements and paranormal beleifs. Musch and Ehrenberg 2002 controlled for differences in general cognitive ability and found that this reduced the performance difference between believers and non-beleivers on probability judgement task to zero. So it may be that poor probability misjudgements are due to low cognitive ability rather than directly causing a tendency to beleive in PSI phenomena.
  2. Evidence that probability misjudgemetns may not explain paranormal beleifs come from Blackmore 1997. She asked over 6000 p's to identify which of 10 statments were true for them. P's were also asked to imagine how many statments would be identified as true for a person selected at random in the streetBlackmore found that people identified on average 2.42 statments as true for themselves and 3.57 as true for others. Blackmore found that people who beleived in ESP generally gave higher answers for themselvesand for others but the differences between self and other was about the same for beleivers and non-beleivers, suggesting that probsbility misjudgement does not explain paranormal beleif.
    1. Validity of research
      1. All of the research reported here depends on two measures. 1. A measure of belief in the paranormal and 2. a measure of the target behaviour (e.g. probability misjudgement). if either of these measures lacks validity then this threatens the overall validity of the findings. Measuring belief in paranormal usually involves a set of statments about psi phenomena, such as the Australia sheep-goat effect, which mainly concerns PSK and PK. Other scales are borader, such as the Paranormal Belief scale which covers an extensive range of paranormal phenomena. Blackmore used a simpler method- just asking people whether they beleive in ESP. The choice of measurement can have an important effect on the results because some characteristics (such as locus of control) only correlate positively if you use a narrow scale.

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Coincidence and Probability judgements

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