It happens to almost anyone. Get caught up in a storm on a Thursday a couple of times and you start half-believing that the weather knows what day of the week it is today. While this obviously doesn’t fit any meteorological finding known to man, it can feel really convincing. If it happens again after you already noticed the ‘trend’, it might become difficult to shake off this irrational belief.
What looks like a pattern may actually be just an unusual constellation of random events that were accidentally lined up. Here are some of the biases that are primarily responsible for this phenomenon.
Mistaking Clustering for Actual Distribution
It’s absolutely possible that you run into a storm three Thursdays in a row, but that’s such a tiny sample that you can’t possibly derive correlation from it, let alone causation. In a truly random set with equal odds for different outcomes (i.e. a storm is just as likely to happen any day of the week), there will be some clusters where the same outcome happens more often than it should. That order of events almost certainly won’t manifest in a set large enough to be statistically relevant, so it’s just a mirage. The laws of statistics can’t predict single events at all, and they produce funny results when they are improperly applied to small datasets.
Recency Bias Makes You Forget Past Negative Examples
Human brain tends to overvalue recently acquired information. Even if you lived through many sunny Thursdays, the last three that were stormy still seem more significant. This fallacy is not limited to interpreting natural events. It is often seen in gamblers who are trying to find a failsafe strategy for an online slot machine or athletes who feel invincible after making a difficult shot (and go on to try an even harder one). In actual statistics, all members of the set have the same weight and need to be properly accounted for before making any conclusions based on their values. Anything else is magical thinking rather than proper logic, and has no place in an honest discussion that aims for the truth.
Confirmation Bias Provides False Proof
We tend to see evidence of our own beliefs everywhere, but stay blind to information that doesn’t fit snuggly into our worldview. This bias is very common, and helps to entrench already adopted opinions that are based on faulty data interpretation. Cherry-picking examples that confirm what we would like to be true won’t stand up to serious scrutiny, but can lead the person to become deeply convinced and difficult to correct. Note that this doesn’t imply any intentional distortion of the facts, since confirmation bias works on an unconscious level and describes how our perception is shaped by the existing mindset. Of course, there are also examples of malicious use of this bias to shape opinions of others by showing them ‘proof’ that is anything but.
Narrative Fallacy Invents Context
Our minds love a good story, and they sometimes won’t let truth spoil it. When we don’t have a plausible explanation for something we observed, we tend to invent one. That’s why people often try to connect completely unrelated phenomena and then provide a quasi-rational narrative that arranges those facts up in a way that seems right. While each individual point in the storyline may be real, the narrative itself remains demonstrably false. Since a lot of natural events are complex and depend on many interconnected causes, it’s quite common to attribute them to a simpler cause that we can wrap our heads around without bordering to learn the difficult parts.
