Hello folks, do I have a doozy of a cognitive bias for you today! Let’s talk about… apophenia!
Apophenia, you say? What’s that, you ask?
Apophenia is not the latest iPhone app or hit singer. Rather, it is defined as the tendency we have to see connections or patterns in unrelated or random things. This actually is the basis for some other biases and fallacies we humans fall prey too, for example the Gamblers Fallacy or Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, which I’ve already covered, are variations on the theme. It’s also the meat n’ taters of a lot of conspiracy theories and “paranormal research.”
For a bit of history, German psychologist Klaus Conrad, coined the term from the ancient Greek apophaínō, which means “to appear,” in 1958. Originally he used the term to describe distortions in the perceptions of patients with psychosis, but the term was later expanded to include the perception of patterns in random data generally.
We run across apophenia constantly in our daily lives. Ever look up at the clouds and see a bunny rabbit? A dog? King Mufasa? Ever seen Jesus or the Virgin Mary in your breakfast toast? Thought you saw a pattern in the stock market that turned out to be random noise? Thought you were about to hit a hot streak on the slot machines? Those are all cases of apophenia.
Our brains are pretty much wired to see patterns in things. Presumably, there is some evolutionary advantage to it. Maybe those of our ancestors that were able to spot the patterns of a predator hiding in the grass survived a bit better, even if sometimes their brains overinterpreted those patterns sometimes and saw predators that weren’t there (better to have some false positives than miss that lion in the shrubbery, right?).
Paradoleia is a type of apophenia that is specific to visual information. Seeing ducks in the clouds or seeing Elvis in the foam of your latte is paradoleia. A famous case of it is the “Face on Mars” — the image at the top of this diary. The photo was taken by the Viking 1 spacecraft as it circled Mars in 1976, and UFO and alien enthusiasts immediately jumped on this photo as proof of alien life having lived on or visited Mars. It’s a face! You can see the eyes and the mouth! It’s gotta be an intentionally created monument!
Only, not so much. In 2001, the Mars Global Surveyor snapped a pic of the same feature using much better imaging equipment and lighting conditions, and got this image instead:
The “face” imaged in 1976 was due to a combination of the particular lighting angle and poor image quality. But we’re so hardwired to see patterns — and particularly faces — in things that the 1976 image spawned all manner of conspiracy theories that the government was covering up proof of aliens.
The same mental phenomenon has led to more recent NASA photos on Mars to be interpreted as alien creatures, “Buddha” statues, even doorways. And of course, paranormal “evidence” is absolutely riddled with paradoliea (and apophenia in general). Is that fuzzy image in the picture taken of that old house a face in the window? Well, probably it’s just a smudge, or reflection or trick of the light. Is that Sasquatch in the trees in that photo? Probably a tree stump badly photographed in twilight conditions from a long way away. And so on.
A personal example of this, some years ago I came across a YouTube video claim purporting to show a submerged city (Atlantis, no doubt!) using Google Earth images. There were what appeared to be wide, regular streets laid out in blocks on the ocean floor! It had to be a city!
So, I looked into the data. The “streets” were roughly a mile wide. On further investigation, what was being seen was the pattern made by ships doing a regular “lawnmower” back and forth sweep while scanning the seabed with sonar to generate the data. Since the ships were going in more or less straight lines in a regular pattern, it caused the data to create an artificial, regular looking pattern in the data when it was all stitched together.
So, not a submerged city. Atlantis it was not.
Emoticons, by the way, are a good example of our tendency to see faces. ;) :D :(
As are emojis and smiley faces in general. Think about it — humans see damned near everything consisting of two dots and a line as a mouth and eyes, the tendency for us to see faces is so hardwired into our brains.
As long as we’re talking about paradoleia, we might as well throw in quick discussion of Rorschach Tests.
Rorschach Tests were developed by Hermann Rorschach in 1921 and became a method of psychoanalysis where subjects are shown a set of ten symmetrical inkblots and asked to tell the tester what the image portrayed is or assign them a meaning. The idea is that by interpreting the results, the analyst can detect patterns of thought or emotional disorders.
There are, needless to say, a lot of detractors of using the tests, because of course there is a lot of potential subjectivity not only in the answers but in the potential interpretation of those answers. Detractors say the test is really little more than an elaborate method of cold reading a subject. On the other hand, efforts have been made to try to remove subjective elements of interpretation, such as by creating the Exner Scale, which scores results based on types of answers given. I’m not a psychologist, so I’m going to stop short of giving a lecture on the accuracy or lack thereof of the Rorschach Test, but I’m pretty sure it’s an example of paradoleia we’re all familiar with through popular culture.
But apophenia is more than just paradoleia, it relates to any kind of information or data. It can be seeing patterns in study data. It can be seeing a “streak” when you’re gambling.
Confirmation bias can be fed by apophenia. The desire to cherry-pick the information your brain is receiving to meet your desired preconceived outcomes is strong, and sometimes a conscious effort to avoid falling prey to it is required. Conspiracy theorists fall prey to this, letting their critical thinking skills fall the wayside in favor of following a perceived pattern that gives them a result they want to see.
So, what to do about apophenia? Well, you can’t stop your brain from coming up with these patterns, but you CAN be self-aware that your brain operates that way and compensate accordingly. Ask questions and test your thinking. Is that data REALLY showing a pattern? Is that photo REALLY Bigfoot riding the Loch Ness Monster? Remember the old saying (attributed to Sigmund Freud, but there is some doubt he ever actually said it — still, the quote makes a valid point, regardless of origin) that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
And of course you can have fun with it. Go outside. Look at some clouds. Wave at the Man In The Moon. Chuckle at those crazy emojis in your emails. And marvel that the complicated chunk of gray matter in our skulls can see a dragon when we look up at a wisp of water vapor a mile in the sky.
Logical Fallacies Bootcamp:
The Strawman
The Slippery Slope
Begging the Question
Poisoning the Well
No True Scotsman!
Ad Hominem
False Dilemma
Non Sequitur
Red Herring
Gamblers Fallacy
Bandwagon Fallacy
Appeal to Fear
The Fallacy Fallacy
Appeal to Personal Incredulity
Appeal to Authority
Special Pleading
Texas Sharpshooter
Post Hoc
Appeal to Nature
Furtive Fallacy
Alphabet Soup
Cognitive Bias Bootcamp:
Bystander Effect
Curse of Knowledge
Barnum Effect
Declinism
In-Group Bias
Hindsight Bias
Survivor Bias
Rhyme-as-Reason Effect