A Lack of Control Increases Patternicity and Superstition

When people feel a lack of control over their environment, their innate drive for Patternicity Is the Tendency to Find Meaningful Patterns in Randomness goes into overdrive. The psychological discomfort of feeling helpless creates a powerful need to regain a sense of order and predictability, even if it is illusory.

This leads to several predictable behaviors:

• Seeing Illusory Patterns: Individuals who are made to feel a lack of control are more likely to see images in random static, perceive patterns in random data, and believe in conspiracy theories.
• Adopting Superstitions: A lack of control is strongly correlated with an increase in superstitious beliefs and rituals. Activities that are inherently unpredictable (e.g., deep-sea fishing, baseball pitching) are associated with more superstitious behavior than more predictable activities (e.g., shallow-water fishing, outfielding). The rituals provide a false, but comforting, sense of control over the outcome.

This is a key mechanism in the The Funnel of Misbelief. The unpredictable stress that often initiates the journey into misbelief also heightens the very cognitive tendency—patternicity—that makes conspiracy theories seem plausible. The feeling of being out of control makes the mind work harder to find patterns, making it more likely to invent them where none exist.

Tags: #psychology #cognition #control #patternicity #superstition #stress #misbelief