The narrative fallacy leads us to see events as stories, which help us make sense of the world.
In Walter Isaacsonâs 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 Jobsâ sentiment of abandonment. This is a prime example of the fallacy, as even Jobsâ himself said that his adoption had anything but a coincidental effect on his success:
Thereâs 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 thatâs ridiculous [âŠ] Knowing I was adopted may have made me feel more independent, but I have never felt abandoned. Iâve 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 doesnât 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
See also
- Hindsight Bias, after the outcome we believe we knew it all along and cannot recall our prior belifs â hindsight bias is the narrative fallacy in time: once we know the outcome, we construct a causal story that makes it inevitable
- Misjudging Reliability and Causality â the narrative fallacy and causal misjudgement are the same mechanism: we impose causal structure on events that are random
- Il Cervello Ăš Progettato per Essere Efficiente non Accurato â narrative is the brainâs efficiency shortcut: a causal story is cheaper to maintain than a probabilistic model
- Conjunction Fallacy, P(Aâ©B) > P(A) feels true when B is representative â narratives make conjunctions feel probable: a conjunction that fits the story is judged more likely than a simple fact that doesnât