This was mentioned in Gilovich’s “How We Know What Isn’t So“, but it happened to me, so I’m going to mention it.

I was talking to a person who says that she can get a parking spot just by believing she’s going to get a parking spot. She swears it works.

It’s easy to see why she would think so. We’re good at detecting patterns that we’re looking for. So she goes to find a spot and sometimes she does and sometimes she doesn’t. But perhaps she used to think she wasn’t going to get a spot, and only noticed all the times she didn’t. Now she thinks she’s going to get a spot, and only notices the times she does. In either case, she’s not influencing the universe; she’s just altering her perception. Which, to many people, is the same thing.

This is the way that faith works. Faith is a kind of biased reasoning in which we interpret essentially random data in a way that benefits patterns we already believe in. Then when we see the patterns, we take it as validation for our theory. It’s very difficult to avoid this kind of thinking, even for people who are trained to watch out for it, but critical thinking helps to control for this kind of bias. In particular, statistics has many ways to test whether a pattern is essentially random or whether it’s significant.

I’m going to start calling this the ‘parking spot’ effect.

I did ask my ‘parking friend’ to keep track of the times she did and didn’t find a spot. If she actually comes back with results, I’ll have to crunch some numbers. But if she’s really committed to her belief, I think I’m pretty safe.