You hear a story about a poor kid of a single parent making it to the finals of the Football World Cup and scoring the winning goal. You look back at what happened in his life before the final and you see his suffering as a kid, his unrelenting coach who won't give up on him, his unwavering will to work out everyday etc.
Soon you think to yourself that this story of perseverance with this dramatic climax/catharsis makes a lot of sense and seems to follow a familiar path seen in numerous rags to riches tales.
Ignoring Arbitrary Factors
But here is the problem, it is not likely that it happened the way you think it did. You are possibly ignoring a lot of other factors that might have contributed to the player's success.
Think about this for a moment; How many kids from a single parent household with a good coach and unwavering will to work out are there in this world? And how many of them make it to the world cup much less the finals of it? The answer is that there are a lot of people who have similar upbringings and they do not get anything close to this type of success.
This makes us wonder that there must be something more to the story, maybe something more arbitrary than tough upbringing and determination. Something maybe even like luck or chance.
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Expecting Linear Cause & Effect Relationship
We are often so obsessed with finding a cause and effect relationship in random events that we will string together a story or believe one that has been strung for us and convince ourselves that our interpretation is the right one.
There is a deep rooted biological basis for this behaviour. It is our way of keeping things simple by viewing outcomes as patterns. Exploring outcomes as random acts with no clear cause-effect relationship will be a heavy burden on our cognitive ability, so we go with a tested narrative structure.
This is narrative fallacy. The phenomenon that makes us believe in a grand story that has been strung together for dramatic reveal or closure with near perfect cause-effect relationship. This in-turn makes us overconfident in our ability to predict the future because of the patterns we’ve been led to believe in the past.
In the player’s example, for every player with those circumstances and qualities who made it, there are many who didn’t. So it would be rational for us to assume that there is more to the story than what meets the eye.
Believing in a grand story is usually not such a big problem. However, becoming overconfident in our ability to predict the future based on these patterns is.
Most twins with similar upbringing don’t have similar outcomes in life, let alone identical ones.
Countering Narrative Fallacy
So how do you counter something so innate and biologically tied to our humanness? Here are some tips:
Accept that narrative fallacy exists and whenever there is a grand story that is being presented, realise that it might not really be the case.
Check source of information/story for bias and conflict of interests. If a sports correspondent or a biographer is doing a profile on someone, he is likely to drum up the dramatics of the subject’s life.
Prioritise evidence over lore. A good lore makes for an exciting fireside chat but it is not very helpful in making objective decisions.
Track your decisions and evaluate your biases for certain types of patterns. Do you always see the rich as undeserving? Or the poor as hardworking? Check these biases and account for them in your evaluations.
Strip away the aesthetics and get a contrarian viewpoint on anything that sounds well scripted with a “logical” flow. The chronology, aesthetics, luck factor etc are often underplayed, overplayed or misinterpreted for dramatic value.
So that was narrative fallacy. What are your thoughts on this?
Have you ever found facts of a story misinterpreted or cherry picked for dramatics? Let me know in the comments or reply to this email.
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Thanks for reading and keep it rational.