Pseudoscience Experiment: Testing Synchronicity

You have a memory of a friend you haven’t seen in a long time. Just then you notice that her favorite song is playing on the radio.

You remind yourself that you need to call your mom. Your phone rings. It’s your mom.

Right in the middle of a sentence you forget a word. It is right on the tip of your tongue. That is when you hear someone say it as they pass by.

Weird, right? You know what’s weirder. These are all true things that happened to me. Are they just coincidences? Of course. But if I believed in the idea of synchronicity, then I would see these things as evidence of something spooky going on.

The term “synchronicity” was invented by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung to describe a “meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.” In other words, a coincidence isn’t just a coincidence, it’s something… else (cue the creepy music). According to legend, he first developed the idea after trying out the I Ching, an interactive Confucian text where the reader selects a passage at random (sometimes with the help of coin toss), and the passage is supposed to give you a special personal insight. Jung believed it worked, and described the mysterious mechanism behind it as “synchronicity.” He later developed the idea more fully with one of his patients, who was a famous scientist, which gave it more scientific legitimacy. For a period of time it was taught in university-level courses as a science rather than pseudoscience.

But no matter how much scientific legitimacy was attached to it at first, it eventually became clear that synchronicity is a fully paranormal idea. And like most paranormal ideas, there is a whole industry out there ready to sell you synchronicity enhancements. There are books on the secrets of synchronicity. There are programs you can buy. And of course, mediums and psychics are always happy to teach you about synchronicity. For a small fee. There are no reliable estimates of how many people buy into the idea, but the rough estimates all have a low number of 20%, meaning that it’s likely that at least one in five people believe it. So it is worth prebunking it with your kid by giving them the the real explanation up front. As is often the case with the paranormal, the real explanation is far more interesting than the magical one. In this case, there are two explanations, and they each provide fun insights into our day-to-day lives.

The first is probability. Coincidences not only can happen, they will happen. In the course of a day thousands of thoughts pop into our minds. A 2020 study estimated that the average person has about 6,000 distinct thoughts a day. I’m skeptical that any study can be that accurate, but thousands of thoughts a day seems reasonable. This means that even if a coincidence like the ones that I described above are a one-in-a-thousand event, there should be many every day. We probably only notice a handful of them. Even if it is a really wild one, a one-in-million event, we should expect at least a couple of those every year. By sheer dumb luck it would look as though the world just responded to our thoughts in some magical way. Given the odds, It would be strange if this didn’t happen!

The second explanation has to do with a psychological concept that came after Jung’s time: confirmation bias. If we believe that synchronicity is a real thing, and we are expecting it, then we are more likely to see meaning in the coincidences that inevitably happen. In fact, confirmation bias is so powerful that you can actually use it to generate your own custom-made synchronicity moments, which brings us to our pseudoscience experiment…

Testing Synchronicity with your kid in three steps:

First, pick something at random. Anything will do. It could be a shape, a name, a historical event, anything at all. If you are having trouble picking something, try this random word generator.

Second, go about your normal day. Don’t do anything special or different. But prime yourself to look for coincidences that happen to relate to your random thing.

Third, share when you find something! If we noticed a coincidence and pointed it out, then it primed us even more and we suddenly had many more coincidences pop up. Confirmation bias is so powerful!

The first time I tried this with my kid the random word generator gave us the word “pyramid.” It didn’t take long before “synchronicities” starting happening all over the place. There was a pyramid on my kid’s box of cereal that morning. On the way to the grocery store a truck with a large pyramid passed us on the road. Soon we were seeing pyramids everywhere, on the money, on t-shirts, in the shapes of clouds. It was a synchronicity party! All thanks to probability and confirmation bias.

This is a simple no-fuss pseudoscience experiment that is fun, doesn’t require any special materials, and teaches kids a valuable lesson: that anyone, even kids, can easily test pseudoscientific claims. And that is a very empowering lesson indeed.

Did you know that in Beyond Belief 3: The Phantom of Highcastle our hero, the kid-skeptic and ultimate investigator Kenai, has to wrangle with a Jungian professor who is teaching the idea of synchronicity? Who is the professor really? Could she be the phantom? If you want to teach your kid about skepticism and critical thinking with a fun adventure, then check it out:

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