My favorite character in Gilligan’s Island–the Professor (aka Dr. Roy Hinkley)—passed away recently. 🙁 Who else will die, I wonder, because these always come in threes, or so it seems.
According to this newly-published study explaining “When Three Charms…, people gravitate to number 3. Being business school profs (Suzanne B. Shu of UCLA and Kurt A. Carlson of Georgetown U.), the authors focused on how to exploit this phenomenon for marketing purposes—their experiments pointing to the power of persuasion being optimized at three claims and no more—the fourth one pushes consumers over to being over-sold.
So be on guard from now on whenever someone tries to sell you on something by touting three reasons. 😉
Getting back to the morbid fascination with celebrity deaths, it may just be that this occurs from the natural tendency to conclude that three events in a row cannot happen just due to chance.
“You reach maximum streakiness at three events.”
– Kurt Carlson quoted by New York Times in 1/3/14 article about The Power of Three
Being somewhat savvy on statistics and generally a rational thinker, I know this is immensely overblown, but I cannot help but succumb to it, in particular when bad things come in bunches. My trick to put a halt to being unlucky is to resolve that whenever I’m hit by three unpleasant events then I watch for three good things to come. I suppose this is just the power of positive thinking overcoming the depressive impact of cursed karma, but this works for me—I encourage you to give it a try.
When the bunch of bad reaches three, that’s it for me–make that your mantra. 🙂