patternicity

Patternicity is what our brains do.

Apophenia, also known as patternicity, or agenticity, is the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns within random data.

I call this process "patternicity" (the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise) and "agenticity" (the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents who may mean us harm).

These tendencies of patternicity and agenticity are also driven "by a meta-bias called the bias blind spot, or the tendency to recognize the power of cognitive biases in other people but to be blind to their influence on our own beliefs."

We just never hear about them unless such deaths happen in clusters and are reported in the media, thereby triggering a type of mass hysteria that leads to conspiratorial thinking and what I call patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise.