Rational Philosophy

The psychology and philosophy of familiarity.

My new baby was born last Friday. My four year old son was born on a Friday, too. And so was I. My mother noted the coincidence. I like coincidences even though rationally I don’t believe they signify anything.

Stephanie Rosenbloom writes in the NY Times about an odd phenomenon — that people identify with people and things that remind them of themselves. Research has shown that, for instance, people with the name Virginia tend to be more likely to move to Virginia (36% more likely than those not named Virginia). “It’s what we call implicit egotism,” says Dr. Pelham, a writer and researcher for the Gallup Organization. “We’ve shown time and time again that people are attracted to people, places and things that resemble their names, without a doubt.” The same effect revealed itself in those who contributed to Bush versus Gore — more Bs for Bush, more Gs for Gore. (Maybe the Democrats should investigate whether more registered independents in the US have surnames that start with an O or with a C…)

This associative effect seems curious but ultimately uninteresting until we dig a little deeper. I wasn’t convinced by Pelham’s easy conclusion that we can chalk this up to implicit egotism. Evolution, it seems to me, wires us to make associations. Making associations helps us connect parallel or related ideas and concepts. If we weren’t wired to make associations, we’d have a much tougher time grappling with abstraction and comparison.

As a case in point, researchers have created a drug that seems to be able to block the lethal effects of radiation by mimicking the action of cancer cells. Andrei Gudkov, of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, led development of the drug (code-named CBLB502). Once Gudkov and his team realized that radiation kills because of an effect called apoptosis — by which reparable cells die off because they have been damaged — they made the association with the actions of cancer. Cancers block apoptosis so that they can replicate. Gukov’s team developed a drug that mimics the malignant trick of cancer cells to block apoptosis for those exposed to radiation, thereby protecting them from cell death.

As with many of the traits that evolution bestows, the mental process of association has pluses and minuses. We have the wonderful, valuable power of association that permits us to draw analogies, extrapolate new ideas, and investigate and solve problems. But we associate even when the association is purely coincidental and signifies nothing. (An extreme example may be obsessive compulsive disorder by which people associate sets of activities or combinations of signifiers with good or bad outcomes.) Looking for one’s Googleganger is a mild side effect, as is the self-satisfaction with the idea that one and one’s sons were all born on the same day of the week.