A few years ago, my teacher planned a game of Jeopardy for my class. “I’ll choose a number between 1 and 100,” she explained, “and whichever group picks the number closest to mine will go first.” Basically, the three groups our class formed wanted to go first to take the critical lead that could lead to winning the game.

As everyone began to chatter about which number they would pick, I turned to my group members. Excitedly, I told them, “Let’s pick 7!” But no matter how much I advocated to choose the number 7, the majority of my group wanted to go with 50.

It turned out that my teacher had, in fact, chosen 7 as her number.

Of course, when I found out that I had chosen the right answer but no one had listened, I never let it go, so it became a running joke among my friends. “It’s fate,” I’d proclaim, because 7 is my favorite number.

But it wasn’t fate. It wasn’t definite like the sum of 2 and 3, which is 5. What it was is a pure coincidence. My teacher and I just happened to have the same number in mind.

As we go about our lives, we see many different events happen every day. When events with no relation to one another become connected, they form a coincidence. A prime example of this would be dreaming about a falling cup and dropping a cup onto the floor the next day.

According to Oxford Languages, a coincidence is “a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection.”

So in reality, coincidences are created by us. In the example of the falling cup, the dream didn’t cause the cup to be dropped- nor did the dropped cup cause the dream. However, we connect the idea that the cup fell in both. In the end, though, the events we connect to create coincidences are all random.

As David Spiegelhalter, who is a University of Cambridge professor, says, “A coincidence itself is in the eye of the beholder.”

Take for instance, some random strings. If we randomly typed in a line of numbers:

49348502489110801028183543839404827374849348475738292200844747383829294775781111838

(Yes, they were randomly typed.)

49348502489110801028183543283940482737484934847573829220084474738382924775781111838

We instantly pick out sequences like 248 and 5432, to name two. 2 multiplied by 4 makes a product of 8, and 5, 4, 3, and 2 are in descending order. We might see dates, ID numbers, and other number combinations as well. 

This leads to the question of why we connect unrelated things.

It’s arguable that it’s human nature to be curious and relate things to create an understanding, common ground, or answers to something unknown or make something ordinary extraordinary.

In 2015, a study about the reasoning behind making coincidences was published in New Ideas in Psychology. As the authors elaborated, some people see coincidences as supernatural or mythical occurrences, even as fate. On the other hand, skeptics don’t believe that destined coincidences exist. 

Magda Osman, one of the authors of the study and an experimental psychologist at the University of London, says, “Once we spot a regularity, we learn something about what events go together and how likely they are to occur.” In fact, the study shows that experiencing coincidences can provide a method to understanding causal reasoning and learning mechanisms of the mind.

In fact, as Bernard Beitman, MD, a professor of psychiatry, found in his research that personality also plays a part in coincidences. People who believe in religious and spiritual practices, or a greater purpose in life, tend to see more coincidences than people who remain skeptical. In addition, he found that finding a coincidence can depend on someone’s emotions, like being upset or irritated.

For believers, coincidences can serve as safeguards of a greater meaning that keeps them afloat. Unus mundus, which is Latin for “one world”, sets to describe “the concept of an underlying unified reality from which everything emerges and to which everything returns.” In other words, a synchronous force that connects everything in reality- and happens to network coincidences all the same.

Furthermore, a common coincidence based on emotion that occurs a lot in fiction is reinspiring a character. If a character dreams about becoming a fashion designer since he was little, and begins to lose motivation to continue pursuing it as he grows older, he might dejectedly walk down a city street one night. Then, he might look up to see something on a billboard that reminded him of why he chose to be a designer in the first place. Motivation comes back, and now he’s determined. Sometimes, something unexplainable might be the thing that really affects us.

In addition, coincidences demonstrate how we form links and relationships with other people- specifically, the 7 billion people on this Earth. There is always a chance you were born on the same day as someone in your classroom or workplace (found to be a 50% chance that two people share the same birthday if there are 23 people in the room), or that you were at the same restaurant as a classmate or colleague when you witnessed a surprise winter parade.

These coincidences can also be missed. You could have never known you were at the same restaurant until you or one of them had brought it up. The coincidence was always there, but it went unnoticed. There could be thousands of these probable events that we never realized had occurred.

In this way, a coincidence leads back to personality. For instance, people who are more comfortable to strike up conversations with strangers have a greater chance of stumbling through such a restaurant event after conversing.

There are millions of bizarre coincidences that just happen to occur. The woman in a photo from 1973 and an exactly identical woman in a photo from 2013. The woman who kept hearing a song and had a headache, only to find that at the time her sister hit her head in a car crash, miles away while that very song was playing in the vehicle. The ship stewardess who not only survived the sinking of the RMS Titanic, but as well as the sinking of the HMHS Britannic and the sinking of the RMS Olympic. Or the man who passed away exactly on the date and time he was born.

Regardless of the infinitely many instances of coincidences, in the end, it’s up to us to stumble upon like events and make the connection. Whether or not a coincidence is a destined fate or has a meaning, coincidences can be one of the most complex events of chance and psychology, and it’s important to recognize that there is more to coincidences than we might believe.

 

written by Saanvi Gutta

edited by Keerthi Selvam and Ananya Balachander

 

 

REFERENCES:

Beitman, B. Coincidence studies. http://coincider.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/BeitmanCoincidenceStudies.pdf

Beck, J. Coincidences and the meaning of life. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/the-true-meaning-of-coincidences/463164/

Diaconis, P., and Mosteller, F. Methods for studying coincidences. https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Papers/diaconis_mosteller.pdf

Osman, M. Explaining coincidences from a cognitive perspective. August 22, 2018. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/future-minded/201808/explaining-coincidences-cognitive-perspective

Osman, M., and Johansen, M.. (2020, March 20). Coincidence judgement in causal reasoning: How coincidental is this? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32200045/

Oxford Languages. https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/

Paturel, A. (2019. January 2). The science behind coincidence. https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-science-behind-coincidence

Unus mundus. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unus_mundus#:~:text=Unus%20mundus%2C%20Latin%20for%20%22one,and%20to%20which%20everything%20returns.

 

Image Credits:

[Digital Art]. https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fdelistraty.com%2F2018%2F07%2F11%2Fon-coincidence%2F&psig=AOvVaw1L9kkDZwyIqLe3S-Q-Aqk3&ust=1606770303790000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CA0QjhxqFwoTCJC4oP3TqO0CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD

Spano, C. [Digital Art]. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-science-behind-coincidence-1508168349

[Digital Art]. http://www.jaburgwilk.com/news-publications/networking-vs-connecting

[Digital Art]. https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fonlinebingo.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fmeaning-in-coincidence&psig=AOvVaw0QwKLSli_HxHjacGTzR5k2&ust=1606770569258000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAMQjB1qFwoTCMjlnpTVqO0CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAT