The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [42]
Figure 6. Find the Hidden Pattern
Most people can see the hidden figure of Saturn in the photograph on the left. Can you pick out the hidden figure in the photograph on the right? If not, then you are probably feeling in control of your life because subjects who are put into a situation where they feel out of control are more likely to see a pattern in this random series of dots. ILLUSTRATIONS COURTESY OF JENNIFER WHITSON.
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“Consider 9/11,” Whitson suggested when I mentioned the time spent by skeptics in debunking conspiracy theories. “There we saw an unstable environment caused by the terrorist attacks that led directly and almost instantly to the generation of hidden conspiracy theories.” But 9/11 was a conspiracy, I reminded her, only it was a conspiracy by nineteen members of al-Qaeda to fly planes into buildings, not an “inside job” by the Bush administration. What’s the difference between these two conspiracies? “It may be that even though we were told immediately that it was al-Qaeda, there was a terrible uncertainty about the future, a sense of loss of control,” Whitson conjectured, “leading to the search for hidden patterns, which the 9/11 ‘truthers’ think they found.”
Maybe. I suspect this is partially true, but there is another factor that I call agenticity that comes into play with conspiracy theories that I will explore in the next chapter. For now, keep in mind that research consistently shows that once people have established what they think is the cause of an event they just observed—(in other words, they have formed a link between A and B)—they will then continue to gather information to support that causal link over other possibilities—if they can even think of alternatives once the first causal link is established, which they usually cannot.
Interestingly, it appears that a negative event, such as a sporting game loss or a failure to achieve a goal, produces even faster causal links and support for those links, especially if it is an unexpected event. Observers (especially fans) produce more causal explanations when a winning team unexpectedly loses to a vastly inferior opponent (an “upset” loss), or vice versa, than if the event went as expected.31 As a lifelong observer of the usually successful Los Angeles Lakers, for example, I can attest to the fact that long winning streaks are notched up to such simple explanations as smooth teamwork, hard work, and the natural talent of the players, whereas the occasional loss generates dozens of column inches and hours of radio talk time in the endless search for this, that, and the other cause—Kobe and Shaq’s feud, Phil’s bad back, payroll disputes, too much travel, too many Hollywood distractions, and so on, anything but the fact that the other team just outplayed them.
The most intriguing and practical finding by Whitson and Galinsky came when they tested the relationship between lack of control and pattern perception in the stock market. Control was manipulated by describing the market environment as either volatile (one group of subjects was shown a headline that read “Rough Seas Ahead for Investors” with a short paragraph description that included the line that investing in the stock market was “like walking through a minefield”) or stable (the other group was shown a headline that read “Smooth Sailing Ahead for Investors” with a short paragraph description that included the line that investing in the stock market was like “walking through a field of flowers”). Subjects were then exposed to uncorrelated sets of information about stocks; they read a series of twenty-four statements about the finances of two companies, some positive and some negative. Company A had sixteen positive and eight negative statements while Company B had eight positive and four