Why do people have weird ideas?

In an earlier blog I named a few of my heroes in the cause of rational thinking. One of those is Michael Shermer who writes the Skeptic column every month for Scientific American. His latest in the December 08 issue talks about the penchant for us mere mortals to seek meaningful patterns in the random cacophony of news and events that bombard us every day. This is called patternicity.

As examples Mr. Shermer asks why do people see faces in nature, hear voices in electronic white noise, or images of the Virgin Mary in coffee stains and dirty windows. The answer he effectively argues is that we are programed by evolution to do so because sensing and reacting to patterns is at the very least a competitive advantage and in some cases a survival mechanism.

It is a competitive advantage because it provides for greater efficiency. For example early humanoids that were able to detect and then predict patterns of movement of game would be more efficient hunters. Similarly the ability to recognize patterns in the behavior of predators would clearly lead to a greater probability of survival and thus would be a genetic trait that would be reinforced in subsequent generations.

Mr. Shermer refers to work done by Harvard University biologist Kevin R. Foster and University of Helsinki biologist Hanna Kokko who have put forth the notion that whenever the cost believing a false pattern is real (i.e. a false positive) is less than the cost of not believing a real pattern (i.e. a false negative) natural selection will favor the development of patternicity.

A real life example that we can all identify with is how we react to a sudden change in our environment. Be it a loud noise or a surprise encounter with another person most people would describe their reaction as being startled - or some might say that (or you) gave me a fright. In other words we are programed to react to such situations as potential threats. You can see how the above theory works in this situation. Clearly the risks of reacting to a non-threat situation as if it were real are low, but the risk of not reacting to a real threat situation are very high.

The problem - As Mr. Shermer points out - is that we are not very good at figuring these probabilities so our tendency to see all sorts of weird patterns in non-meaningful data is usually a harmless low-cost artifact of our evolved need to detect and react to non-weird patterns. So keep on looking for UFO's and messages in tea leaves. For the most part it won't hurt anyone, but don't quit your day job.