Judgment of coincidences: Mine versus yours  

Oleh:

Falk, Ruma

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: The American Journal of Psychology vol. 102 no. 4 (1989), page 477.
Topik: Coincidences; Judgement of Coincidences; Experiment
Fulltext: 1423303.pdf (1.83MB)

Isi artikel

Previous research indicated that subjects are not very surprised when reading coincidence stories, apparently because they regard the coincidence as one of many events that could have happened. This was true with respect to coincidences written by somebody else. However, there were indications that subjects found their own coincidences more surprising than those of others. The present study examines that egocentric bias and explores it further. In Experiment 1, a rotating design was employed in which the same story served, in turn, as self- and as other-coincidence, thereby controlling for the story's objective surprisingness. In Experiment 2, the coincidences occurred "spon- taneously" in the course of the experiment, thus controlling for self-selection of subjectively surprising stories. Self-coincidences were judged more sur- prising than those of others in both experiments. The results suggest that the more personally meaningful the self-coincidence, the more surprising it is. The "one chance in a million" will undoubtedly occur, with no less and no more than its appropriate frequency, however surprised we may be that it should occur to us. (Fisher, 1953, pp. 13-14)

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