"Patternicity" is a term often credited to author Michael Shermer, to describe the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in random data or meaningless data.
Shermer writes "We are left with the legacy of two types of thinking errors: Type 1 Error: believing a falsehood and Type 2 Error: rejecting a truth... "He continued "Believers in UFOs, alien abductions, ESP, and psychic phenomena have committed a Type 1 Error in thinking: they are believing a falsehood. It's not that these folks are ignorant or uninformed; they are intelligent but misinformed. Their thinking has gone wrong." So he uses it almost exclusively as a pejorative (meaning in the negative) in terms of encapsulating why people have been said to see faces in clouds, hear hidden messages in music played backward, or be overly sympathetic to supernatural phenomena. We however, would say it should also apply to meaningful data because the concept can also be supportive in terms of the human brain's evolved ability to recognize valid patterns, a skill crucial for survival. Identifying patterns allowed early humans to predict weather changes, recognize dangerous animals, and find food.
For example, our ancient ancestors, which have been both more primitive and more advanced than us in our current state, in their earlier more primitive evolutionary development, realized that when they saw high grass moving in a non-natural way, as would happen from the breeze or wind, it would mean a certain percentage of the time that a predator, which they could not directly see or even hear, could be lurking in that area, some of the time, but not all of the time. Most of the time it was an animal, but not one that would attempt to eat them or their children. But either way that pattern of behavior in the grass was worth paying attention to. Fast forward to today that the pattern-recognition ability can also lead to correct future outcomes or also to false positives, such as seeing patterns that aren't there because it’s usually better to be safe and err on the side of caution than it is to be sorry and miss a real threat.
Patternicity is related to other cognitive phenomena such as apophenia, which is "the tendency to perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things" and pareidolia, which is "a specific type of apophenia where people see faces or other significant images in random stimuli". And with three definitions in this one already being given, we'll give one more adjacent definition... The word consciousness is a 64,000 hour conversation, and there are multiple good definitions of the word that each have overlap. But one definition of the word that we like is "your ability to recognize patterns and meaning both externally out in the world, and internally within your own psychology." Because there are absolutely repeating actions being played out in society that both benefit the average individual and the average people (which we also highlight as the balanced middle class), and also other repeating actions that do not benefit them.
So being conscious of patterns (both false and true) can help explain a wide range of human behaviors both within the world out there and within ourselves and in the next one we are going to share two specific patterns we've recognized, which we of course feel to be true, that have caused a dramatic shift on our personal outputs.