When life gets chaotic, it's natural to try to figure out what's going on. But sometimes, the desire for an explanation may lead us to perceive patterns that don't exist, says Jennifer Whitson, a management scholar at the University of Texas, Austin. A study conducted in the 1970s, for example, found a correlation between bad stock market performance and an increase in the amount of space newspapers devoted to horoscopes and articles about astrology. Failing to find an explanation for their falling fortunes in the economic data, people apparently started looking to the stars. Another study found that parachute jumpers are more likely to see a nonexistent figure in a picture of random dots and squiggles just before they jump.
Intrigued by such findings, Whitson teamed up with Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. In one experiment, the researchers asked 41 undergraduates to recall a situation in which they'd lacked control (such as being a passenger in a car accident) and another group to recall a situation in which they'd had full control (such as going into an exam well-prepared). Then the subjects read passages describing an event preceded by an action that may or may not have influenced the event. One passage asked them to imagine that they were successful marketers whose ideas were rejected after they failed to perform their customary ritual of stomping the ground three times before the meeting. The subjects who previously recalled an in-control experience were more likely to write this off as mere coincidence than were those who'd recalled being out of control, Whitson and Galinsky report in tomorrow's issue of Science.
