Quantum Pings Library
Making Sense of Randomness: Implicit Encoding as a Basis for Judgment
- Type
- Study
- By
- Ruma Falk and Clifford Konold
- Journal
- Psychological Review
- Source
- Psychological Review
- Published
- 1997
Shows that people see structure and pattern in random sequences, and that this is the perceptual root of the feeling that coincidence means something.
Ruma Falk and Clifford Konold's "Making Sense of Randomness" (1997, Psychological Review) gets at the perceptual root of the whole topic: people do not experience randomness as random. Given a sequence of coin flips or a field of dots, the mind finds structure, runs, and pattern.
That finding is the foundation of the apophenia explanation. The feeling that a coincidence "means something" is not a failure of reasoning so much as a feature of perception — the brain encodes the world as structure, and only later does statistics tell us the structure was noise. The paper explains why the feeling is so compelling, and why it is so often wrong.
In plain language
People often see patterns in random events, like coin flips or scattered dots, even when there is none. This tendency to find meaning in coincidences is not a mistake in thinking but a natural way our brains work. The study explains why we feel strongly about these patterns, even though they can be misleading.
The meaning
The study explains why the feeling of pattern is so compelling — it is built into how perception works.
The skeptic
It demonstrates that the "pattern" people report in coincidences is generated by the perceiver, not the world.
About the research
Psychologists who study how people perceive and misperceive random sequences.
Key takeaways
- Documents how people read structure into random sequences.
- Published in Psychological Review, 1997.
- The perceptual foundation of the apophenia explanation.