Life’s challenges often appear to pile up at once. A series of unfortunate events—a lousy breakup followed by an illness, or a car breakdown coinciding with financial troubles—can feel overwhelming.
These patterns raise complex questions: Are these events genuinely connected or coincidental? How does human perception influence the clustering of bad events? And, if we contribute to such patterns, how can we mitigate their occurrence in the future?
The Illusion of Clusters: How Cognitive Biases Shape Perception
Human beings are natural pattern-seekers, a trait rooted in evolutionary necessity. Recognizing patterns has historically enabled survival, from identifying predator tracks to predicting seasonal changes.1
However, this same cognitive tendency can lead us to perceive meaningful connections in random information, a cognitive bias known as apophenia. The German neurologist Klaus Conrad coined the term in 1958 to describe a particularly prominent form of this bias, which he had observed in patients with schizophrenia.2
Common examples of apophenia in people with schizophrenia include seeing neutral facial expressions as hostile, hearing random street conversations as targeted at them, believing that unrelated events are signs of a personal conspiracy, and superimposing shapes and patterns of familiar objects onto the background land, nature, or cityscape.3
While apophenia is especially common in schizophrenia, we are all prone to some degree of the phenomenon. Most of us have experienced seeing faces or other familiar patterns in things like clouds, rocks, or buildings, such as seeing a church as a chicken face or a cloud as an angel descending on Earth. This type of visual apophenia is also known as pareidolia.
Coincidence or Cause? Understanding Statistical Deviations
Another form of apophenia we are all prone to is the so-called clustering illusion—the tendency to perceive patterns in random distributions due to temporal proximity or similarity. When a gambler sees a winning streak as a sign that they will continue to win, this is a case of the clustering illusion.
We are prone to the clustering illusion because we have a poor instinctive grasp of statistics. We intuitively expect random sequences to be more evenly distributed than they are, leading us to interpret coincidences as anomalies.4
However, even rare events occur occasionally, given enough opportunities.5 In statistics, this is also known as the law of large numbers, which says that unlikely events become statistically probable over a long enough timeline.
Like many other statistical laws, the law of large numbers has counterintuitive outcomes, as demonstrated by, for example, the birthday paradox: in a group of only 23 people, there’s a 50 percent chance that two individuals share a birthday.
Other cognitive biases can increase our susceptibility to the clustering illusion when we are facing a series of misfortunes, including the negativity bias, the availability heuristic, and confirmation bias:6, 7
- Negativity Bias: Negative events often carry a heavier emotional weight than positive ones due to a negativity bias, a tendency to focus more on negative stimuli. When bad events occur in close succession, this bias amplifies their emotional impact, making them seem disproportionately significant.
- Availability Heuristic: We tend to judge the frequency of events based on how easily they come to mind. If recent bad events are particularly salient, they may be perceived as a pattern of adversity.
- Confirmation Bias: Once we suspect bad things happen in clusters for a reason, we are more likely to notice and remember evidence confirming our suspicion while ignoring contrary evidence.
Experiencing misfortunes that occur close together in time or space amplifies our susceptibility to the clustering illusion because our stress response to misfortunes can narrow attention and reduce cognitive flexibility.8 When overwhelmed, we may struggle to contextualize events rationally, instead focusing narrowly on our immediate hardship.
Do We Contribute to the Cluster of Bad Events?
While randomness is often the main reason terrible things sometimes seem to occur in clusters, our natural stress response to hardship can sometimes lead us to contribute to clusters of adversity inadvertently through behavioral feedback loops.9
Say you lose your job due to layoffs. Distressed and emotionally exhausted, you delay adjusting your budget and incur mounting debts.
Stress can impair our thinking and judgment and strain our relationships. Dwelling on adverse events can reduce motivation and cause delays in proactively addressing the issues we face; impaired judgment can lead to decision-making errors that exacerbate existing problems, and strained relationships can escalate conflicts, creating a cascade of personal and social challenges.
Mitigating Clusters of Misfortune
Specific strategies can help reduce our contributions to bad events occurring in clusters. One effective technique is cognitive reframing, which requires reinterpreting bad events to find a silver lining, thereby reducing their emotional weight and decreasing the chance that one bad event leads to another.10
Strategies that may help prevent or disrupt behavioral feedback loops include paying attention to which behaviors and habits of ours tend to contribute to clusters of hardship, as well as practicing self-compassion to prevent self-defeating cycles of guilt, regret, and despondency.