Kahneman on Narrative Fallacy: When we write the details of some interesting past Episode -- a 3 hour football match or a 3 day battle or a 3 year war or a 30 year career or a 300 year rise and fall of an empire -- we select and recount events sequentially, and within this narrative a reader is inclined to assume that one event was caused by the previously described events. Sometimes the writer is explicit about causation (I bet no historian ever wrote war broke out on the date .... without attempting to say why!) and sometimes the writer isnt; but our mental processes tend to lead us unconsciously toward the post hoc ergo propter hoc assumption. The main point is that even if one can identify proximate causes of particular events within a larger Episode correctly, after the fact, this doesnt contradict the hypothesis that the way the Episode as a whole developed was unpredictable. Seeing the historical details makes us forget it might have just been chance; the Frog might not have been a Prince after all.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Feb 2014 19:10:33 +0000
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