The Role of Chance in Psychology
Chapter 11
Order
 The human brain seeks order: patterns, explanations,
structure.
 Allows us to perform amazing feats of information
processing and knowledge acquisition.
Order
 Backfires when no inherent order to element in
environment.
 We dislike chance, so we assign structure to random events,
resulting in conspiracy theories, money managers, gambling
books and classes, folk beliefs, more.
Illusory Correlation
 When people believe that two events should commonly
occur together, they tend to see co-occurrences often, even if
the two event occur randomly.
 Stems from deep desire to control our surroundings.
Just-World Hypothesis
 Tendency for people to believe that the world is a fair place
when people get what they deserve.
 Belief that things even out.
Application to Psychology
 Psychologists must accept error in order to reduce error.
 Legitimate psychologists admit that theories do not account
for the entirety of human behavior.
 Depression medication example
Take Home Point
 Chance and randomness are everywhere in the world, even in
psychology.
 Instead of fighting chance, we need to accept that we will
make errors about unusual cases in order to facilitate greater
accuracy in the majority of cases.
Any Questions?