Unlikely
Events -- And Coincidence
Newspapers frequently
run stories of the following kind: a man lost his University of Virginia
class ring while sailing off the Carolina coast. He reached up to halt
the swing of a boom, and accidentally sent his ring flying off into the
sea, where it sank in about 30 feet of water. A year and a half later,
another man was talking to a friend in an alley behind a restaurant in
Charlottesville, Virginia, when a bright glint in some trash from the
restaurant caught his eye. Investigating, he found a class ring, and
from the inscription was able to locate the man who had originally lost
the ring and return it to him. The two men assumed, after comparing
stories, that the ring was swallowed by a fish which was later caught
and sold to the restaurant, then discarded unseen in the waste from the
preparation of the fish for a dinner. Of course, many other explanations
are possible, but it is not important for the present discussion just
HOW the lost ring made its way from the sea to an alley behind a
restaurant. Whatever happened involved many remarkable coincidences …
or did it? Another news item
reported how two women had met in a Tulsa, Oklahoma hospital two years
ago when they had given birth to daughters about an hour apart. Even
though they had solemnly vowed to keep in touch, they had not seen or
spoken to one another since -- until they found themselves back in the
same hospital, both having given birth to sons, this time about four
hours apart. One sometimes reads
about the bridge player who receives a 13-card hand consisting of all
the spades. By chance, such a hand should be dealt only once in
635,013,559,600 times! Incredible, right?
All experience
reported by many people is that of traveling to a distant city only to
encounter a friend or acquaintance from back home, on the street or in a
store or some other public place. The event seems even more remarkable
when we consider how easily it could NOT have taken place. Had either of
the two friends decided to go to Museum X instead of Museum Y, or taken
an earlier bus, or overslept, or taken longer for lunch, or gotten on a
different elevator, or any of hundreds of alternatives presented in the
course of daily events that preceded the encounter, the event would
never have happened and the two people would never have realized that
they were both in the same remote city at the same time.
Perhaps most of the
people who have, or read about, such experiences accept them as being
very unlikely, very uncommon, but not otherwise unusual. Most people
seem to feel no need to appeal to supernatural explanations for these
events. But we frequently encounter in pseudoscience the claim that such
events are in fact miraculous, and that some mysterious force or
influence is required to bring about the event at all. Instead of
accepting such events as normal events of low probability, there are in
fact international organizations devoted to the collection,
preservation, and dissemination of examples of such "strange"
occurrences, which the organization find highly significant, mysterious,
and certainly NOT due to "mere coincidence." Often the
examples are rendered more dramatic than otherwise by involving some
famous person or media personality, or being part of some famous event
in history. Here are some instances from an article in the January 1982
issue of Science Digest.
-
British
novelist Dame Rebecca West was writing a story in which a girl finds
a hedgehog in her garden. Just as West finished this passage, she
was interrupted by servants who informed her they had just found a
hedgehog in her garden.
-
When
Norman Mailer began his novel Barbary Shore, there was no plan to have a Russian spy as a
character. As he
worked on it, he introduced a Russian spy in the U.S. as a minor
character. As the work progressed, the spy became the dominant
character in the novel. After the novel was completed, the U.S.
Immigration Service arrested a man who lived just one floor above
Mailer in the same apartment building. He was Colonel Rudolf Abel,
alleged to be the top Russian spy working in the U.S. at that time.
-
While
the Allied Forces were planning the Normandy invasion of June 6,
1944, the following code words were used (and were among the best
kept secrets of the war): Utah
and Omaha for the beaches
where the landing would take place; Mulberry,
for the artificial harbor which would be put in place after the
landing; Neptune, the
overall plan for Naval operations; Overlord
the entire planned invasion itself. On May 3, 1944, the first code
word, Utah, appeared as an
answer in the London Daily
Telegraph crossword puzzle; on May 23, Omaha
appeared similarly; on May 31 Mulberry
appeared; and on June 2, four days before the invasion, Neptune
and Overlord both
appeared. British Intelligence investigated intensively and
extensively, but the man who had created the puzzles was found to be
innocent of espionage, had no knowledge of any invasion plans, and
to all intents and purposes had chosen the words at random.
There is no question
that unusual events of this kind happen, and it is easy to imagine how
dramatic and impressive they must have seemed to the people who were
involved. When something happens that is perceived by those involved to
be dramatic or unexpected, there is a tendency to look for equally
"dramatic" causes for the event.
That such an event is due to "mere coincidence" is
usually dismissed at once as a possibility. People tend to look for
something impressive, a supernatural or "psychic" or religious
explanation for the event. Psychologists call this the "Oh,
Wow!" Syndrome.
But just how
remarkable are these events? Is the hedgehog experience of Dame West
more or less remarkable than the meeting of the two women in the
hospital twice on occasions two years apart? Are the odds of a spy
living near you at the time you decide to write a novel involving a spy
that much different from the odds of being dealt a bridge hand with 13
spades? Is it less likely that Utah, Omaha, Mulberry and two other
common words would be used in a crossword puzzle just at the time a
secret military operation has given them a secret significance, than
that the sailor would get his class ring back a year and a half after
losing it in the ocean?
Take the 13-spade
bridge hand, where it is simple to calculate the odds. With 20 million
bridge players dealing 30 hands a week, we should get one all-spade hand
per 20 years. In fact, as bridge expert Oswald Jacoby pointed out, such
hands are reported much more frequently, perhaps a dozen times per year.
An obvious explanation, easily verified on several occasions, is that
one or more players conspire to play a practical joke on the other
players by simply stacking the deck. It is a harmless way to get your
name and photograph in the newspapers. If two people in the same
profession, who routinely must travel from Austin to New York several
times per year on business, were to happen to meet in the airport or in
a familiar hotel, we would hardly consider this as unusual. Yet it is
not so much more unusual for two elderly friends to decide to take a
vacation in Washington, D.C., in May to see the cherry blossoms,
independently, and to run into one another by chance at one of the
places every tourist visits while in Washington. Again, if hedgehogs are
fairly common in English gardens, it is not too surprising that Dame
West was writing about finding one and that in fact one was found in her
garden. Again, if both of the women in Tulsa were married to men in the
oil business, who are regularly separated from their wives for many
months while they work in overseas oil fields, then our view of the
probability of both women being in the maternity ward at the same time
is greatly changed. Generally, people tend to underestimate
grossly the probability of any event that happens to them, especially
one perceived at "strange."
Pseudoscientists
frequently take advantage of this inability of people to understand the
nature of coincidence. Thus coincidences that are hardly remarkable are
passed off as "miracles" that can only be explained by ESP,
intervention by benevolent Space Brothers or guardian angels, etc. The
failure to understand the odds is particularly noticeable when one hears
about feats of alleged psychics, fortunetellers, astrologers, and others
who claim to foresee future events.
Pseudoscientific
predictors tend to stress the time or two they made a really spectacular
correct "prediction" -- for some reason we don't hear about
the thousand other "predictions" made by them during the same
time period, that didn't quite pan out. Recall the fable about the boy
who cried wolf; eventually he was correct, but he had given so many
false alarms prior to that time that the villagers didn't respond to the
valid warning. For some reason, many people in our society do not
recognize the parallel between the boy in this fable and the alleged
"psychics," who are allowed to get away with being wrong
nearly all the time, and still are taken seriously on the rare occasions
they happen to be correct.
Let's take an
example. Suppose you try to guess every time the telephone rings who is
calling before picking up the receiver. Inevitably you will be correct
if you guess often enough, just by chance. The usual practice is to
remember and talk about only the times when you were correct; but if you
keep track of the misses as well as the hits, you will see that the
correct guesses are no more frequent than sheer chance would imply. If
we consider the hundreds of thousands of stories that are written by
Dame West, Norman Mailer, and other thousands of active writers being
published over the years, we soon realize that by accident
some incident described in one of these stories will eventually prove to
have parallels in real life. It simply has to be that way. The
remarkable thing would be if none
of those plausible incidents described by writers ever happened!
The point is that
each moment of each day of even the most ordinary, humdrum life of an
individual is filled with events, and each of those events, no matter
how ordinary, is quite improbably. It is very improbable that just as I
sit down to type something, a student comes into my office to ask me
something. But I sit down to type very frequently, and students come
into my office very frequently, so it's bound to happen sometimes. Only
if every time I sat down to type,
a student came into my office, would something miraculous be
happening. Once this is appreciated for the events of our own humble
lives, it should be clear that it must pertain for the lives of famous
and important people as well. A "strange" event happening to a
famous person, or at a crucial moment in history, is no more or less
strange than a similar event happening to you in the bathtub tonight.
What would be
paranormal, what would be miraculous, what would be unexplainable, would
be if NO SUCH coincidence or unlikely accidents or "strange"
events every happened to anyone.
Further Reading
How
to Take a Chance, by Darrell Huff and Irving Geis, Norton, New York,
1959 Lady
Luck, by Warren Weaver, Anchor Press, New York, 1965; Dover, New
York, 1982; see especially chapter 13, "Rare Events, Coincidences
and Surprising Occurrences."
Acknowledgments
ASTOP -- The Austin
Society to Oppose Pseudoscience -- has prepared fact sheets on various
topics for the benefit of teachers and others interested in promoting
critical thinking. Dr. Dennis McFadden, Professor of Psychology at the
University of Texas at Austin, is the author of this fact sheet.
The International Cultic Studies Association
(formerly American Family Foundation), a professional research and
educational organization concerned about the harmful effects of cultic and
related
involvements,
prints and helps distribute these fact sheets. Because ASTOP fact sheets
seek to stimulate critical thinking, rather than advance a particular
point of view, opinions expressed are those of the authors.
These fact sheets may be copied for educational purposes, but
they may not be reproduced for resale. |
