Pigeons and People

I was talking with a friend of mine about a book I've read recently, called Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Among many other things, the book talks about how animals (humans included) are hard-wired to attempt to make sense of events in some structured manner, whether or not those events objectively were interrelated.

Case in point: Taleb references B.F. Skinner's research with the formation of superstition in pigeons. In Skinner's work, he places a pigeon in a box and drops food pellets in for it to eat at completely random intervals of time. Soon, the pigeon is performing elaborate dances and rituals, presumably with the belief that if it performs the dance correctly, it will cause the pellet to appear.

So, what's the moral of the story? We tend to repeat the same behavior as the pigeon, believing that our thoughts and actions have created some outcome, when in truth randomness may have had a lot more to do with it than we may know or give credit.