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From Will Smith to the Ukraine war, why do we keep comparing unrelated events online? | Rachel Connolly
On social media, a tendency to connect disparate news stories is causing many of us to lose our sense of reality
As a child, in the back of the car on drives along the motorway, I would look for connections between the number plates on surrounding cars. How many started with an odd number? How many with an even number? The search for patterns is a common human trait. People also see images in TV static, or nonexistent patterns in the goals scored in football games. There is a term for this: illusory pattern perception, the human tendency to try to make sense of the world by finding relationships between stimuli. It has been found to be a “central cognitive mechanism” accounting for conspiracy theories and supernatural beliefs.
I see this in the inclination to stitch together disparate cultural events (see, here I am, looking for meaning) that has become widespread on social media. The tendency to think that everything can be linked to something else, or compared, or both, and hence explained. The recent Oscars slap by the actor Will Smith was compared, nonsensically, to both Harvey Weinstein’s sustained history of sexual abuse and harassment, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This was just one recent example of something that happens all the time.
Rachel Connolly is a London-based journalist from Belfast
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