Narrative Fallacy

Have you heard of Narrative Fallacy? Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes¹:

The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship upon them.

We love weaving stories because it makes it easy to remember facts, so a lesser cognitive load. It helps give us a sense of order, a sense of meaning even; but the question is: is that underlying order possibly an over-interpretion of facts?

It gets even more complicated when one is trying to analyse and interpret emotions. I feel we rarely analyse happy or healthy emotions. You will probably not find anyone asking themselves “Why is this making me so happy?”. But how unhealthy or negative emotions make us feel have a higher chance of being met with some form of analysis. And when we do this, how do we ensure we do not fall prey to this narrative fallacy?

My first thought was that since we are talking about describing a reality, a set of facts, perhaps a second opinion, preferably of someone who was party to the said reality might help. This would be something like corroborating eyewitness accounts from multiple people who saw an accident. One can then average out the accounts to get a reasonable picture of what actually happened. Of course, continuing with this example, a record of some sort would have helped, like CCTV footage. But in the absence of that, such an averaging of accounts may be the best bet.

But how can one do that when analysing emotions? My bet is on journalling and maybe mood tracking. Both when looked at in conjunction, over a large period of time, might reveal behavioural patterns or some structure to work on. But even then, there is the question of how do we ensure that the journal entry itself is not a biased account? One way could be to get your recollection peer-reviewed by someone who was a part of the incident that you journaled. With your partner or close friend, maybe you can be vulnerable and listen as they tell you their version of what happened or what they saw and that helps you with recalibration.

But what if that too is not possible? As Taleb further gives an example²:

“Say some unpleasant event, such as a car accident for which you feel indirectly responsible, leaves you with a bad lingering aftertaste. You are tortured by the thought that you caused injuries to your passengers; you are continuously aware that you could have avoided the accident. Your mind keeps playing alternative scenarios branching out of a main tree: if you did not wake up three minutes later than usual, you would have avoided the car accident. It was not your intension to injure your passengers, yet your mind is inhabited with remorse and guilt.”

Taleb’s suggestion³ is to make the event appear unavoidable, to consider it was bound to happen. And to do that, he suggests using a narrative.

“Patients who spend fifteen minutes every day writing an account of their daily troubles feel indeed better about what has befallen them. You feel less guilty for not having avoided certain events; you feel less responsible for it. Things appear as if they were bound to happen.”

But his suggestion is oriented towards people working in randomness-laden professions (eg. markets). In those cases, perhaps this narrative building exercise would help. But what about the earlier example of the car accident?

If you were the driver who caused the accident, would you find it difficult to accept that you were at fault? If you do accept that you were to blame, would you take 100% of the blame? If you were narrative building to convince yourself that it was unavoidable, would that involve you pinning the blame entirely on something else? Sometimes, there is footage⁴ for a more objective analysis, but what if there isn’t any? Maybe after a few years you start driving again. If you do, does your driving style change depending on how you narrativised yourself out of it by delegating a majority of the blame to something else and not yourself? I don’t have any answers of course, let me know if you do.

Footnotes