From mere coincidences to meaningful discoveries

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Publié par	jjggi
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Langue	English

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Cognition 103 (2007) 180–226

www.elsevier.com/locate/COGNIT

From mere coincidences to meaningful discoveriesq,qq Thomas L. Griﬃths,*a, Joshua B. Tenenbaumb aSciences, Brown University, Box 1978, Providence,Department of Cognitive and Linguistic RI 02912, United States bDepartment of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States Received 4 August 2005; revised 12 March 2006; accepted 19 March 2006

Abstract People’s reactions to coincidences are often cited as an illustration of the irrationality of human reasoning about chance. We argue that coincidences may be better understood in terms of rational statistical inference, based on their functional role in processes of causal discovery and theory revision. We present a formal deﬁnition of coincidences in the context of a Bayesian framework for causal induction: a coincidence is an event that provides support for an alternative to a currently favored causal theory, but not necessarily enough support to accept that alternative in light of its low prior probability. We test the qualitative and quan-titative predictions of this account through a series of experiments that examine the transition from coincidence to evidence, the correspondence between the strength of coincidences and the statistical support for causal structure, and the relationship between causes and coincidences. Our results indicate that people can accurately assess the strength of coincidences, suggesting that irrational conclusions drawn from coincidences are the consequence of overestimation of

qThis Manuscript was accepted under the editorship of Jacques Mehler. qqWhile completing this work, TLG was supported by a Stanford Graduate Fellowship and JBT by the Paul E. Newton Career Development Chair. We thank Tania Lombrozo, Tevye Krynski, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on this manuscript, Onny Chatterjee and Davie Yoon for their help in running the experiments, and Persi Diaconis for originally inspiring our interest in coincidences. *C respondingauthor. Tel.: +1 401 863 9563; fax: +1 401 863 2255. or E-mail address:tom_griﬃths@brown.edu(T.L. Griﬃths). 0010-0277/$ - see front matter2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2006.03.004

T.L. Griﬃths, J.B. Tenenbaum / Cognition 103 (2007) 180–226181 the plausibility of novel causal forces. We discuss the implications of our account for under-standing the role of coincidences in theory change. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords:Probabilistic reasoning; Theory change; Causal induction; Bayesian modelsCoincidences;

1. Introduction In the last days of August in 1854, the city of London was hit by an unusually violent outbreak of cholera. More than 500 people died over the next fortnight, most of them in a small region in Soho. On September 3, this epidemic caught the attention of John Snow, a physician who had recently begun to argue against the widespread notion that cholera was transmitted by bad air. Snow immediately suspected a water pump on Broad Street as the cause, but could ﬁnd little evidence of contamination. However, on collecting information about the locations of the cholera victims, he discovered that they were tightly clustered around the pump. This suspicious coincidence hardened his convictions, and the pump handle was removed. The disease did not spread any fur-ther, furtheringSnow’s (1855)argument that cholera was caused by infected water. Observing clusters of events in the streets of London does not always result in impor-tant discoveries. Towards the end of World War II, London came under bombardment by German V-l and V-2 ﬂying bombs. It was widespread popular belief that these bombs were landing in clusters, with an unusual number of bombs landing on the poorer parts of the city (Johnson, 1981). After the war, R.D. Clarke of the Prudential Assurance Com-pany set out to ‘apply a statistical test to discover whether any support could be found for this allegation’ (Clarke, 1946, p. 481). Clarke examined 144 square miles of south Lon-don, in which 537 bombs had fallen. He divided this area into small squares and counted the number of bombs falling in each square. If the bombs fell uniformly over this area, then these counts should conform to the Poisson distribution. Clarke found that this was indeed the case, and concluded that his result ‘lends no support to the clustering hypothesis’ (1946, p. 481), implying that people had been misled by their intuitions1 . Taken together, the suspicious coincidence noticed by John Snow and the mere coincidence that fooled the citizens of London present what seems to be a paradox for theories of human reasoning. How can coincidences simultaneously be the source of both important scientiﬁc discoveries and widespread false beliefs? Previous research has tended to focus on only one of these two faces of coincidences. Inspired by examples similar to that of Snow,2one approach has focused on conceptual 1Clarke’s investigations were later introduced to a broader audience byFeller (1968). 2stars about the Earth, Aristotle viewed theSuch examples abound. In considering the apparent rotation of coincidence between the rate of motion and the distance traversed as evidence for the existence of a single celestial sphere (Franklin, 2001, pp. 133–134would never have discovered his comet without noticing). Halley the surprising regularity in the paths and dates in a table of orbits (Cook, 1998; Hughes, 1990; Yeomans, 1991). Semmelweis might not have developed his theory of contagion without noting the similarity in the symptoms of a doctor injured during an autopsy and those of patients in his ward (Hempel, 1966).Perrin’s (1913/1990) argument for the objective reality of molecules was based upon the suspiciously similar estimates of Avogadro’s number produced by several quite diﬀerent methods of measuring molecular magnitudes (Hacking, 1983).

182T.L. Griﬃths, J.B. Tenenbaum / Cognition 103 (2007) 180–226 analyses or quantitative measures of coincidences that explicate their role in rational inference (Horwich, 1982; Schlesinger, 1991), causal discovery (Owens, 1992) and scientiﬁc argument (Hacking, 1983). An alternative approach, inspired by examples like the bombing of London,3has analyzed the sense of coincidence as a prime exam-ple of shortcomings in human understanding of chance and statistical inference (Diaconis & Mosteller, 1989; Fisher, 1937; Gilovich, 1993; Plous, 1993). Neither of these two traditions has attempted to explain how the same cognitive phenome-non can simultaneously be the force driving human reasoning to both its greatest heights, in scientiﬁc discovery, and its lowest depths, in superstition and other abid-ing irrationalities. In this paper, we develop a framework for understanding coincidences as a func-tional element of causal discovery. Scientiﬁc knowledge is expanded and revised through the discovery of causal relationships that enrich or invalidate existing theo-ries. Intuitive knowledge can also be described in terms of domain theories with structures that are analogous to scientiﬁc theories in important respects (Carey, 1985; Gopnik & Meltzoﬀ, 1997; Karmiloﬀ-Smith, 1988; Keil, 1989; Murphy & Medin, 1985and these intuitive theories are grown, elaborated and revised in large), part through processes of causal discovery (Gopnik et al., 2004; Tenenbaum, Griﬃths, & Niyogi, in press). We will argue that coincidences play a crucial role in the development of both scientiﬁc and intuitive theories, as events that provide support for a low-probability alternative to a currently favored causal theory. This deﬁnition can be made precise using the mathematics of statistical inference. We use the formal language of causal graphical models (Pearl, 2000; Spirtes, Glymour, & Schienes, 1993) to characterize relevant aspects of intuitive causal theories, and the tools of Bayesian statistics to propose a measure of evidential support for alternative causal theories that can be identiﬁed with the strength of a coincidence. This approach allows us to clarify the relationship between coincidences and theory change, and to make quantitative predictions about the strength of coincidences that can be compared with human judgments. The plan of the paper is as follows. Before presenting our account, we ﬁrst critique the common view of coincidences as simply unlikely events. This analysis of coinci-dences is simple and widespread, but ultimately inadequate because it fails to recog-nize the importance of alternative theories in determining what constitutes a coincidence. We then present a formal analysis of the computational problem under-lying causal induction, and use this analysis to show how coincidences may be viewed as events that provide strong but not necessarily suﬃcient evidence for an alternative to a current theory. After conducting an experimental test of the qualita-tive predictions of this account, we use it to make quantitative predictions about the strength of coincidences in some of the complex settings where classic examples of coincidences occur: coincidences in space, as in the examples of John Snow and the bombing of London, and coincidences in date, as in the famous ‘‘birthday

3Again there are many examples.Diaconis and Mosteller (1989), Gilovich (1993), Hardy, Harvie, and Koestler (1973), and Plous (1993)all present a number of surprising coincidences that ultimately seem to be simply the work of chance.

T.L. Griﬃths, J.B. Tenenbaum / Cognition 103 (2007) 180–226183 problem’’. We conclude by returning to the paradox of coincidences identiﬁed above, considering why coincidences often lead people astray and discussing their involve-ment in theory change.

2. Coincidences are not just unlikely events Upon experiencing a coincidence, many people react by thinking something like ‘Wow! What are the chances of that?’ (e.g.,Falk, 1981–1982). Subjectively, coinci-dences are unlikely events: we interpret our surprise at their occurrence as indicating that they have low probability. In fact, it is often assumed that being surprising and having low probability are equivalent: the mathematicianLittlewood (1953)suggest-ed that events having a probability of one in a million be considered surprising, and many psychologists make this assumption at least implicitly (e.g.,Slovic & Fischoﬀ, 1977). The notion that coincidences are unlikely events pervades literature address-ing the topic, irrespective of its origin. This belief is expressed in books on spirituality (‘Regardless of the details of a particular coincidence, we sense that it is too unlikely to have been the result of luck or mere chance’,Redﬁeld, 1998, p. 14), popular books on the mathematical basis of everyday life (‘It is an event which seems so unlikely that it is worth telling a story about’,Eastaway & Wyndham, 1998, p. 48), and even the statisticiansDiaconis and Mosteller (1989)considered the deﬁnition ‘a coinci-dence is a rare event’, but rejected it on the grounds that ‘this includes too much to permit careful study’ (p. 853). The most basic version of the idea that coincidences are unlikely events refers only to the probability of a single event. Thus, some data,d, might be considered a coin-cidence if the probability ofdoccurring by chance is small4On September 11, 2002, . exactly one year after terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center in Manhattan, the New York State Lottery ‘‘Pick 3’’ competition, in which three numbers from 0 to 9 are chosen at random, produced the results 9–1–1 (Associated Press, September 12, 2002). This seems like a coincidence,5and has reasonably low probability: the three digits were uniformly distributed between 0 and 9, so the probability of such a com-bination isð110Þ3or 1 in 1000. Ifdis a sequence often coinﬂips that are all heads, which we will denote HHHHHHHHHH, then its probability under a fair coin is ð12Þ10or 1 in 1024. Ifdis an event in which one goes to a party and meets four people, all of whom are born on August 3, and we assume birthdays are uniformly distrib-uted, then the probability of this event isð1365Þ4, or 1 in 17,748,900,625. Consistent with the idea that coincidences are unlikely events, these values are all quite small.

4In general, we will use upper-case letters to indicate random variables, and lower-case letters to indicate the values taken on by those variables. Here,dis a value of the random variableD. 5Indeed, many people sought explanations other than chance: the authorities responsible for the New York lottery were suﬃciently suspicious that they initiated an internal investigation, and the St Petersburg Times quoted one psychologist as saying that ‘It could be that, collectively, the people in New York caused those lottery numbers to come up 9–1–1. . .enough people all are thinking the same thing, at the sameIf time, they can cause events to happen’ (DeGregory, 2002).