Given the important conceptual connections between cause and coincidence as well as the extensive prior research on causality asking, "how causal is this?", the present research proposes and evaluated a psychological construction of coincidentality as the answer to the question, "how coincidental is this?" Four experiments measured the judgment properties of a reasonably large set of real coincidences from an initial diary study. These judgements included coincidentality and an array of other judgments about event uncertainty, hypothesis belief and surprise as predictors of coincidentality consistent with and supporting our prior definition of coincidence (Johansen & Osman, 2015): "coincidences are surprising pattern repetitions that are observed to be unlikely by chance but are nonetheless ascribed to chance since the search for causal mechanisms has not produced anything more plausible than mere chance." In particular, we evaluated formal models based on judgements of uncertainty, belief and surprise as predictors to develop a model of coincidentality. Ultimately, we argue that coincidentality is a marker for causal suspicion/discovery in terms of a flag that a new, unknown causal mechanism may be operating.

中文翻译：

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因果推理中的巧合判断：这有多巧合？

鉴于原因和巧合之间的重要概念联系以及对因果关系的广泛先前研究，“这有多大的因果关系？”，本研究提出并评估了巧合的心理构造作为问题的答案，“巧合是什么？这？” 四个实验测量了初始日记研究中相当大的一组真实巧合的判断特性。这些判断包括巧合和一系列关于事件不确定性、假设信念和意外的其他判断，作为巧合的预测因素，符合并支持我们先前对巧合的定义（约翰森和奥斯曼，2015）：“