There Is Always A Reason For Success, Even When There Isn't

Notorious behaviorist B.F. Skinner found that he could create bizarre behavior in pigeons with random reinforcements. If it twice happened that the pigeon was scratching its ear as a pellet of food was delivered at random, it would start to believe that the ear scratching produced the food, and the behavior was reinforced. As humans, of course, we would never make such a crude error. We have much more sophisticated ways of misleading ourselves.