The American behaviorist B. F. Skinner was notorious for his pigeon experiments. Particularly famous was his attempt to use pigeons as pilots of explosive-loaden kamikaze planes. After World War II, he again turned to civilian research. Hoping to transfer his findings to humans, he tested various methods of conditioning. In one of his experiments, he was able to demonstrate a high capacity for superstitious beliefs in pigeons. The experimental design was simple: hungry pigeons are fed at periodic intervals. What is exciting, however, is the behavior of the pigeons. In search of the “schedule of reinforcement”, they repeat the behavior that was shown immediately before the first feeding. The correlation of behavior and reward is confused with causality. In popular science and the entertainment industry, this phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the pigeon effect.
But unfortunately not only pigeons suffer from this confusion. In humans, too, the need for meaning and coherence often exceeds the explanatory potency of empirical evidence. In its most extreme form, this behavior slips into the realm of pathology. Paranoid schizophrenia, for example, can manifest itself in this way. But also all other humans are united by a propensity for pattern recognition. Evolutively, this approach makes perfect sense – the pigeon will hardly be harmed by a few spins in vain. To have done nothing and therefore not to have received any food on the other hand would be a Darwinian dead end. But like many other human traits, we lack fine-tuning for the globalized world of the 21st century. In the information age, apophenia is unleashed. Smallest chunks of knowledge must be speculatively extrapolated to display a world full of complexity and irregualrity. The big gaps are bridged with scientifically illegitimate borrowings of supposedly similar sets of topics. The end result is a self-referential construct of perceived and, above all, comforting truths.
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