The late writer and television presenter Bamber Gascoigne once marvelled at how the human mind has an equal capacity for both pattern recognition and self-deception in the 1982 book The Quest for the Golden Hare.
In this out-of-print book, he documented the national (and international) obsession over the armchair treasure hunt and his discovery came in the context of how people responded to the news that the eponymous Golden Hare prize from the 1979 book Masquerade had been found.
This was a relatively innocuous and high-profile example of the psychological concept of apophenia, or how people have a penchant for finding connections and patterns between ideas, objects and concepts that have no relation to each other.
Whilst in this case it is relatively harmless and encouraged by the puzzle-solving context of Masquerade, there is a somewhat more harmful side to this behaviour which can create beliefs and patterns of behaviour that can take extensive individual therapy to unpack.
A good example of this in action can be seen in the behaviour of frequent and compulsive gamblers, who believe in the predestination of randomised results, the concept of lucky numbers and at times can extend into outright anthropomorphism or believing the lottery machine or cards are alive.
The most harmful context and one that tragically is seen more regularly is in the form of the conspiracy theory, which is the connection of often unrelated events or actions to a larger plan undertaken by a shadowy and immensely powerful group to subvert existing institutions.
This reached the point that the term “conspiracy theory” was itself subject to a conspiracy theory that claimed that US government agencies had coined the term in 1963 to discredit believers in other conspiracy theories.
The primary reasons for why people see patterns that do not exist are the result of how people recognise patterns in the first place.
Comparing stimuli to existing templates can create false positives, looking for close matches to existing prototypes can lead to incorrect assumptions, and the Skinner Box theory, which suggests that even in situations of randomness, people will repeat an action believing there to be a connection between the action and the reward.