2. Mental Models
Overview
The narrative fallacy leads us to see events as stories, which help us make sense of the world.
In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, the success of the entrepreneur is explained by the influence of his father, a careful, detailed-oriented engineer and craftsman, who he later found not to be his biological father, hence his need to prove himself and his zeal. The recent movie further underlined Jobs’ sentiment of abandonment. This is a prime example of the fallacy, as even Jobs’ himself said that his adoption had anything but a coincidental effect on his success:
There’s some notion that because I was abandoned, I worked very hard so I could do well and make my parents wish they had me back, or some such nonsense, but that’s ridiculous […] Knowing I was adopted may have made me feel more independent, but I have never felt abandoned. I’ve always felt special. My parents made me feel special.
These stories come from the urge to understand the world, and it makes us believe that we can explain the past through cause-and-effect when we hear a story that supports our prior beliefs. They tend to be simpler and more concrete, assigning to talent, stupidity and intentions a bigger role than fortune, while also focusing on few extraordinary events that happened rather than the countless events that have not happened.
This does not mean that skill does not matter, take for example an experienced rafter. He learned to read the river and predict obstacles, making small adjustments in posture to keep his balance trough hundreds of descents. On the other hand, much less are the opportunities to learn to create a gigantic company and even less the possibilities of avoiding hidden rocks. Not that the latter doesn’t require skill, but fortune has a more prominent role than what is usually narrated.
Narratives change with time, but also with unexpected events, which is reasonable but it has some dangerous consequences. It has been proved that when we adapt a new vision of the world, we immediately lose the capability of remembering what we used to believe before the change. This is also called hindsight bias