Patterns

Once in a while, psychologists do interesting things. 

Bear with me, as I have a point to make about writing fiction.

The Gambling Task

The Iowa Gambling Task is an experiment regarding “gut feelings.”  The researcher presents the subject with a game of cards involving four virtual decks.  The subjects get to draw cards from the decks, one at a time, in whatever order they wish.  In the game, some of the cards award positive points and some negative.  The player’s score is tallied after each draw. 

The kicker to this game is that the decks are rigged.  All of the decks have both positive and negative cards, but two of the decks result in better scores, at least in the long run.  At the start of the experiment, the subjects—people playing the game—are unaware of any difference in the four decks.  Eventually, however, they figure out the pattern, namely that two of the decks are better.  As might be expected, once aware of the difference they then begin to choose accordingly.  For most participants, this takes about forty draws. 

Here’s what makes this interesting.  Most participants consciously figure this out after about forty draws, but statistical analysis shows that they start changing how they choose cards after as few as ten draws.  In other words, they have a subconscious “gut feeling” about the bias in the cards even before they are aware of it.

It gets even weirder.  The psychologists wired the fingertips of the players to detect changes in galvanic skin response—think “lie detector.”  These detected physical changes as early as ten draws, well before the players were aware of any bias.  In other words, the subjective gut feeling involved a physical response, also before they were even aware of it. 

There are other interesting features of this test.  For example, people with certain kinds of brain damage that impair empathy and the ability to make moral judgements tended to not show the galvanic response and to take longer to figure out the bias.  Even more peculiar, such people tended to continue to choose the decks with lower payoff despite knowing the outcomes would be worse.

Patterns and Fiction

Now you’re probably wondering what an obscure psychological experiment has to do with writing.  Well, the relevant point from this experiment is that patterns influence people, and that the influence happens even when the people are not consciously aware of the pattern. 

It’s not just that there is merit to “gut feelings.”  There is merit in using patterns in our fiction because they induce gut feelings in the reader even when the reader is unaware of the pattern. 

What kinds of patterns? Well, any kind. 

There’s the famous “rule of three.”   Suppose, for example, at the climax of your romance novel the protagonist must choose between her career and her lover.  Since it’s a romance, the happily-ever-after ending requires her lover wins.  But if, prior to the climax, she has twice before had to choose between her career and something else of value and has chosen career, now we’ve upped the tension.  The prior choices suggest a pattern and an expectation, even if the readers don’t consciously make the connection.

Then there’s plot.  The whole idea of a “beginning, a middle, and an end” dates to Aristotle’s Poetics.  The three-act play is another pervasive pattern in literature.  Billy Wilder reportedly said that this structure consisted of “in the first act of a story you put your character up in a tree and the second act you set the tree on fire and then in the third you get him down.”  Countless stories follow this pattern.  Think of the typical TV show, with the acts neatly sandwiched between commercial breaks.

Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey is an elaboration on the three-act play, made famous by George Lucas in Star Wars.  But countless movies and novels use this pattern—from The Magnificent Seven to Huckleberry Finn.

Of course, archetypes exploit cultural patterns.  Boris Badunov (Boris Godunov) and Natasha Fatale (femme fatale) were the archetypical bad guys in Rocky and Bullwinkle, even though the target audience of pre-teens probably never heard of either prototype.  They didn’t need to be aware of the basis since the archetypes themselves are already pervasive in our culture.

Cadence and the sound of words create patterns and expectations—consider, just for one of countless examples, The Raven.  Setting also sets expectations, especially if elements of a setting repeat.  The same goes for sounds.  If the rolling thunder of a motorcycle plays a roll in the middle of your story, putting a similar sound at the beginning and end can help unify the parts, even if most readers won’t even think about it.

You get the idea.  It’s worth your while to put patterns in your stories.  It helps you as you think through what’s important and what’s not.  It helps you to unify your story and to tie things together. It helps to add tension and structure.  It does all of these things, even if most readers never overtly notice the reference.