Baggage Check: Three, the Magic Number?

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Dr. Andrea Bonior dives into the world of psychology.

IT'S BEEN AN extraordinarily eventful week in the entertainment industry, with the passing of Michael Jackson, arguably one of the most famous people on Earth, reverberating around the world. More analysis — in gigabytes and in ink — has spilled forth than I could ever begin to digest.

But one curious aspect of the public's reaction, from a psychological perspective, is the perennial insistence that celebrity deaths happen in threes. No matter how much the evidence stacks against it (it seems crass for me to list the additional well-known deaths that have happened in the past few weeks as contradiction), many people still are quite attached to this theory.

It's hard to dispute, just because people get to make up the rules as they go along. There's no time period cutoff, or parameters for how famous someone needs to be. And no one starts talking about threes the countless times that a single celebrity dies, but when two celebrities have passed away, then people simply wait however long they need to until a third has passed away to ”prove„ their theory.

How has this belief come about? What cognitive needs does it fill? My take is that it gives some semblance of structure, meaning, or predictability to chaos and randomness (in the real sense of the word, not the surfer vernacular) that might otherwise feel too overwhelming. It puts things in boxes that are neater and more palatable. It makes us think that someone, somewhere, might have a plan.

There's nothing wrong with our need to feel more in control by searching for patterns — until it does just the opposite, by making us see something that's not really there.