Truth 19. Beware of seeing patterns that aren't there

Shortly after we were married, my wife and I moved into a small, second-floor apartment. The quiet, old gentleman who lived below us was mercifully hard of hearing, so he wasn't disturbed by our noisy cats thundering across the floor above his head. This neighbor passed away a few months after we moved in, and we were expecting the apartment to be leased again. One evening, I heard a loud radio blaring downstairs. The new people had arrived. The music continued through dinner, and I had a sinking feeling about the quality of our new neighbors.

But I was reluctant to make my first contact be a complaint about music. After all, we would have to live together, and they might not be so happy about having stampeding cats overhead. We might need some goodwill. So I waited through the evening. But the music didn't stop. I envisioned these hard-partying rockers downstairs—certainly rude and inconsiderate (and possibly armed and dangerous).

We crawled into bed, and the music was still playing. Finally at 1 a.m., I screwed up my courage and went down to confront the monsters. I knocked, but the door was open, so I pushed in. The apartment was completely empty except for some paint cans, drop cloths, and a boom box in the corner where the painters had left it. I shut off the radio and went to bed, feeling rather foolish.

I had based all my decisions throughout the night on my certainty that the music was coming from the new tenants. I had concocted this whole frightening portrait of these new neighbors based on the music coming from the floor below.

We as human beings are so good at making sense of the world that we often see patterns that aren't really there. We see "hot hands" in poker or "winning streaks" in basketball that are actually just statistical anomalies. We have a desire for coherent stories—the simpler the better—that explain reality. This is the miracle of seeing images in the inkblot test, clouds, or in the man in the moon. We are pattern-matching machines. Then we base our decisions on these stories we tell ourselves about reality.

We have to be careful to test our stories and our perceptions, as I finally did when I went down to confront the "neighbors." I could have done that earlier in the night. Instead of confronting them about the music, I could have just stopped by to welcome them to the neighborhood. We need to step back from our view of the world and test whether the patterns we see fit the picture.

The incident with the new neighbor was a small mistake, but much bigger ones have been made on the same principle. (Think about the evidence that added up to a picture of "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq that contributed to the U.S. decision to invade.) In any case, we often make decisions based on a certain view or story we've developed. First of all, we need to look creatively for other stories that might be supported by the same facts (a painter instead of an obnoxious neighbor). We also need to probe carefully for information that doesn't fit with the picture (paint fumes), and when we find these new pieces of the puzzle, we need to step back and see if our current story is the best one to explain what happened.