Synchronicity

Skimming through papers on Jung's Synchronicity, I want to know whether people's selectivity is identified as the similarity of meaning between events. Also, has probability been determined?

The study from the University of Wisconsin [4] studies similarities college students can identify between each other. Life is not a controlled environment and trying to measure the likelihood of, for example, two robberies at the same fast food franchise may be too difficult.

Does Jung consider that people are really good at finding connections, no matter how loose they are? We have the Six degrees of Kevin Bacon meme that showed that most actors are well connected to Kevin Bacon based on co movie productions. Someone else went on to find that there are even better connected actors out there.

But who has stopped to think that just as a study about similarities between University of Wisconsin psychology students, actors in Hollywood are bound to have roles together. It has been taken for granted that the other billions of people in the world do not have Kevin Bacon numbers because they are neither film actors nor Hollywood film actors. This is a tight knit group of people to begin with.

The prior was the notion that people take initial similarities for granted. Swimmers in the Olympics will have similarly really good times, because they were hand picked from those who swam in Olympic trials. But how about "accidental" similarities ?




[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
[2] http://www.hulu.com/watch/222871/fringe-stowaway
[3] Phil Dowe and Mitch Parsell University of Tasmania, "Jung’s Concept of ‘Coincidence’"
[4] THOMAS C. ROWE AND DOUGLAS B. HENDERSON, "Establishing Prevalence of Commonalities in Randomly Paired Individuals as a Method for Assessing Synchronicity", Dept. of Psychology, University of Wisconsin at Stevens Pt. , 1995.

[5] Malcolm Gladwell , Tipping Point