A study on coincidences

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to determine if two personality factors, egocentricity and paranormal belief, influenced people’s assertions about ostensible psychic factors involved in coincidences. Participants (N = 75) were presented with six coincidences from two literary sources (Jung, 1973; Plimmer & King, 2004), and were then asked to rate them on degree of paranormality. Since some people believe that some coincidences are too astounding to have normal explanations, it was theorised that there is a relationship between paranormal belief and attribution of psychic causes to coincidences. The egocentricity bias is a bias brought about by egocentrism, which is defined as the belief that another person’s perceptions and knowledge bases are the same as one’s own (Falk, 1989). It was theorised that egocentricity influences the degree to which coincidences are thought to be caused by psychic factors. In the present study, egocentricity was measured on the Selfism Scale (Phares & Erskine, 1984). Participants were divided into ‘High’-, ‘Medium’-, and ‘Low’-Selfism groups, and were designated paranormal believers (sheep), or paranormal nonbelievers (goats), based on Australian Sheep-Goat Scale scores (Thalbourne, 1995a,b). The High-Selfism group rated the coincidences higher on paranormality than the other two groups, and there was a sheep-goat effect (sheep rated the coincidences higher on paranormality than goats). Alternative explanations of the results are discussed, and recommendations made for future research.