Narrative fallacy: Why many of your explanatory stories are incorrect
We tend to create cause-and-effect stories without checking whether they are true.
The narrative fallacy is our tendency to create incorrect cause-and-effect stories out of one or more events.
For example, you come home from work, want to call a friend but can't find your mobile phone anywhere. You're sure you used it on the bus home. Your partner calls your number, but you don't hear your ringtone. You start to panic: your phone must have been stolen by the suspicious-looking man who stood next to you in the crowded bus. Five minutes later, this turns out to be a narrative fallacy when your partner finds your phone in a side pocket of your laptop bag. It’s on silent.
In many ancient cultures, it was believed that lightning bolts were caused by sky gods. This turned out to be a narrative fallacy when Benjamin Franklin used a kite to demonstrate that lightning is a form of electricity.
Evolutionary origin
Humans evolved over about two million years in small tribes of a few dozen individuals, and hunted animals and gathered food until about 12,000 years ago. For 99 percent of our evolutionary history we were hunter-gatherers. This long pre-agricultural period adapted our brains to a tribal life of hunting and gathering, shaping many of our current psychological traits.
Understanding cause-and-effect relationships helped our hunter-gatherer ancestors survive in a harsh and dangerous world, and gave them a major evolutionary advantage. Those who could come up with the right causal explanations were more likely to survive and pass on their genes. These explanations allowed them to respond appropriately to what happened, predict how similar events would unfold, bring about desired outcomes, and avoid undesirable outcomes.
For example, it was valuable to understand which foods cause food poisoning, which herbs cure disease, and that hitting a nut with a rock causes the nut to burst. When they heard a twig creak in the bushes, it was wise to assume that it was caused by a dangerous animal such as a sabre-toothed tiger, because not noticing a predator can be very costly in terms of survival and reproduction.
Hunter-gatherers could not survive in the wilderness without their tribe. To avoid being banished, they had to understand what behaviour made other tribesmen happy or angry with them, which required knowledge of their tribesmen’s personality traits and intentions.
Hunter-gatherers lived in a small tribe of no more than about 100 people. They had no permanent residence and no private property. The causal explanations that they needed to survive in this environment were simple, linear, and concrete. They didn’t need to understand complex systems of causes and effects or statistical relationships.
Explanatory cause-and-effect stories
As a result of our long evolutionary past, our mind is constantly trying to make sense of ourselves and the world by automatically creating explanatory cause-and-effect stories. When something happens, we have an innate drive to want to know why. Why did I feel anxious before giving a presentation last week? Why did my partner get upset when I forgot our anniversary? Why did my colleague get a promotion instead of me? Why did my internet connection drop during an important video conference call?
Our mind immediately tries to make a connection between what happened and one or more causes, based on the limited information it has and what it knows about the past. It extracts simple underlying regularities from our observations, allowing it to predict what might happen in the future.
Our mind treats the information it has as if this is all there is to know. It builds the best possible causal explanation from this information, and if this is a coherent story, we believe it. We then use this explanatory story as a basis for our thinking and reasoning. The less we know, the easier it is to construct a coherent causal story because there are fewer pieces to connect.
Belgian psychologist Albert Michotte argued that we perceive causality directly. He created simple visual sequences in which, for example, a moving black square comes into contact with another square that immediately begins to move. Observers perceive a powerful illusion of causality, even though they know there is no real physical contact. Even six-month-old infants view the visual sequences as cause-effect scenarios and indicate surprise when the sequence is changed.
Psychologists Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel made a short film in which an aggressive large triangle bullies a smaller triangle and a terrified circle. The perception of intentional causality and emotion, of course, takes place entirely in the minds of the observers. Our minds are strongly inclined to attribute personality traits and specific intentions to entities.
When something seems inexplicable, we tend to invent a cause, no matter how unlikely, to satisfy our need for coherence. Humans are prone to supernatural beliefs, for example, to beliefs in invisible person-like beings such as spirits, ghosts, demons, angels, and gods. Many of these beliefs have been scientifically proven to be narrative fallacies, for example, the belief that disease is caused by demons. But to the extent that these invisible beings can be appeased, belief in them can give us an illusion of control, which can be comforting in an uncertain and dangerous world. Instead of feeling ruled by luck and randomness, which can be unsettling and make us anxious, we want to have the comfortable sense that there is order in the world and that we are in control of our lives.
Persuasive explanatory stories generally have some of the following characteristics:
👉 They describe simple, linear, concrete cause-and-effect relationships.
👉 They give an account of the actions and intentions of humans, supernatural beings or inanimate objects. Our minds tend to think in terms of beings with personality traits and specific intentions.
👉 They satisfy our need for coherence: effects need causes to explain them.
👉 They focus on events that happened and ignore events that didn’t happen.
👉 They underestimate the role of luck, because being lucky is a random event that explains nothing. The more luck is involved, the less we can learn from a story.
Narrative fallacy
The narrative fallacy is our tendency to infer causalities that don’t exist, or that are an oversimplification of reality. Reality is usually messy, complex, with intricate webs of causes and effects, in which luck plays a major role. The narrative fallacy is a cognitive bias.
Let’s look at a few examples of the narrative fallacy in action.
👉Every athlete has an expected level of performance. Due to the influence of luck, an athlete sometimes performs exceptionally well for a certain period of time. Instead of attributing this exceptional performance to luck, causal explanations are given. When the period of luck is over, performance returns to the expected level, for which causal explanations again are provided.
For example, a certain football striker is expected to score 15 goals per season based on his past performance. However, due to some lucky coincidences, he scores 25 goals, making him the national top scorer. His exceptional performance is explained by a change in training exercises and spending more time in the gym. The next season, his luck runs out and he scores 12 goals, which is explained by overconfidence and the pressure of high expectations.
👉The same goes for books that provide causal explanations for the difference in success between companies. This difference is largely due to sheer luck, which contributed to both the success of the thriving companies and the lack of success of the others. Since the difference is based on luck, we can expect the average difference in success between companies to narrow over time, which is exactly what always happens.
👉 There is a statistical correlation between increased ice cream sales and higher rates of drowning during the summer months. A narrative fallacy might suggest that the increase in ice cream sales directly causes more people to drown. However, the correlation is likely due to the fact that both variables are influenced by a third factor: warm weather. Warm weather increases the likelihood that people will swim (which leads to more drownings) and also increases the demand for ice cream.
👉 Many people believe in the concept of lucky numbers and choose to use them in various aspects of their lives, such as when choosing lottery numbers or important dates. Many people avoid the number 13 because of superstitions that it brings bad luck. These beliefs are rooted in narrative fallacies rather than in any objective evidence that specific numbers bring good or bad luck.
We usually don't investigate the truth of stories
We tend to seek out and favour information that supports our pre-existing beliefs, and to ignore or devalue information that contradicts those beliefs (confirmation bias).
We generally assume that our fabricated causal stories are true without examining whether they are.
Our minds are lazy by nature, so once they have come up with a plausible story, they don’t look for alternatives. We also don’t try to falsify our stories by searching for counterexamples. But any event or series of events can be interpreted in multiple coherent ways, each with a different cause.
For example, a successful entrepreneur was adopted as a child. A persuasive causal story could be that he became successful because as an adoptee he worked extremely hard to prove himself worthy of the love of his birth parents. If we tried to falsify this story, our focus would shift to the many adoptees who fail to become successful entrepreneurs, and we would see the story for what it is: a narrative fallacy.
The same goes for stories explaining the success of famous athletes. These stories are usually about parents pushing them to excel, their natural talent and hard work, and the help of excellent coaches. We don't ask ourselves if those were the only reasons for their success. But most athletes with exactly the same background don’t make it to the top, so these stories are narrative fallacies. Of course, natural talent and hard work are essential, but factors such as luck and timing play a major role.
Consequences
Usually our explanatory stories are close enough to reality to support sensible actions. But by believing stories to be true without investigating whether they are, we end up believing many false explanatory stories. These flawed stories distort our view of ourselves and the world without us being aware of it.
The narrative fallacy can lead us to believe that we understand the world more than we really do. The fallacy gives us the illusion that we understand the past, which implies that the future must be knowable. But we understand the past less than we believe. For example, it can lead us to believe that from the stories of successful companies or athletes we have learned what it takes to succeed, and that the explanations given for their success predict future success. This sense of learning is an illusion, because these stories underestimate the role of luck. Bad luck could have disrupted one of the successful steps. Strategic choices, luck, and circumstances may all have played a role.
How can we reduce the impact of the narrative fallacy?
Watching out for fallacies is tiresome, but can be worth the effort when the stakes are high. For example, on a personal level when you believe an explanatory story about why you want to invest a large sum of money in a business venture, or why you want to move to another country. Or at a social level to test whether a medicine works against a certain disease, or whether a new government policy works.
🛠️ Increase your awareness of the narrative fallacy
The first step is to become aware that we all have a tendency to create incorrect cause-and-effect stories, including the journalists and writers of the stories you consume.
Especially for high-stakes stories, ask yourself questions like the ones below and try to answer them as best as you can:
🤔 What other plausible explanatory stories can I come up with?
🤔 What additional causes may play a role?
🤔 What role might luck, timing or other circumstances play in this story?
For success stories you can additionally ask yourself:
🤔 Which entities (such as companies or athletes) had exactly the same initial conditions, but failed?
🤔 Which entities had different initial conditions, but succeeded?
🤔 Which identified success causes were necessary? Which may have had no effect? And which could have had a negative effect?
Be as specific and detailed as possible in your answers.
🛠️ Test explanatory stories
Think of explanatory cause-and-effect stories as hypotheses whose truth need to be tested with rigorous experimentation.
For example, the gold standard of evidence for clinical trials is the Randomised Controlled Trial. The explanatory story being tested is often that a specific medication makes a positive difference to the people who receive it. Two groups are formed by randomly assigning people to these groups. The persons of one group receive the medication, and the persons of the other group get a placebo (without knowing that they are not receiving the medication). When the trial is done properly, which is not easy, the results will show whether the people who take the new medication end up doing better than those who don’t.
References
Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
Avoiding Falling Victim to The Narrative Fallacy, Farnam Street
Creatures of Coherence: Why We're So Obsessed With Causation, Pacific Standard, by Ross Pomeroy
The Story of Stories, Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam, featuring Tania Lombrozo
My blogposts about biases and heuristics are available here:
https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/category/Biases
