Parking Spot Effect — part 2

Many people think that they can influence the universe with only their thoughts. It goes by ‘faith’, ‘manifesting’, or ‘creating your own reality’.

Whenever I run into one of these souls, I sometimes tell them about the Parking Spot Effect, which I’ve blogged about before, and which was mentioned in Gilovich’s “How We Know What Isn’t So. Here’s how the PSE works: You believe — really believe! — that you’re going to get a spot, and your thoughts somehow go out into the universe and cause people to vacate spots close to where you’d like to park.

I was telling a dear friend about this over the weekend, only to find that she was a fervent believer in PSE. “Oh, yeah, that totally works. I do that all the time,” she said.

“It could work,” I said. “Or it could be that you’re just noticing the times you get a good spot and not noticing the times you don’t.”

She didn’t like that very much. I think I was being insufficiently believing.

I explained how you could test the idea statistically. Compare how often you get a ‘good spot’ to how often not. Time it. Try ‘believing’ and ‘not believing’.

But she refused the test. Her reason? “If you believe it, you wouldn’t do the test. You have to believe all the way, not sort of believe and sort of doubt.”

And so her faith in PSE will go unchallenged by facts.

Why is it that the PSE seems to have such a hold on the minds of credulous folk? I think it may be the fuzziness of the test. How often would you completely fail to find a spot and have to return home? Never. So you have a huge chance of finding some spot within a wide range of time.

A good test would look like this:
The PSE works if you
a) do a concrete ritual to influence the universe.
The ritual needs to be concrete so that you can try doing it and not doing it, and compare the effects either way.
Once you’ve done the ritual,
b) find a ‘good spot’
c) within a ‘narrow range’ of time.
And then you define ‘good spot’ and ‘narrow range’ in terms of meters and minutes.

Compare this to what folks usually do with the PSE:
a) ‘believe’ somehow, which is very fuzzy,
b) find some spot (revising the definition of what a ‘good spot’ is so that any spot you get is a ‘good one.’)
c) within any range of time.

Under these circumstances, it would be difficult for the test to fail, and there are a lot of out-clauses.

The PSE shares a lot of features with other kinds of traditionally religious faith. The Priest says “Exercise faith and you’ll get something that you want.”
If it works, the system is considered true.
If it doesn’t work, extend the parameters and definitions so it still seems to work.
If even that fails, you can claim the conditions weren’t met (you didn’t have enough faith), or the desired outcome wasn’t part of the Plan.

Anything to salvage the belief system. Just don’t examine it too closely. When you examine something fake too closely, it breaks. If it’s real, it works whether you believe in it or not.