what made one explanation more likely than the other, or why we weren't
both wrong (there was no, or little, silverware at the time, which seems the
most likely explanation).
Beyond our perceptional distortions, there is a problem with logic itself.
How can someone have no clue yet be able to hold a set of perfectly sound
and coherent viewpoints that match the observations and abide by every
single possible rule of logic? Consider that two people can hold incompatible
beliefs based on the exact same data. Does this mean that there are possible
families of explanations and that each of these can be equally perfect
and sound? Certainly not. One may have a million ways to explain things,
but the true explanation is unique, whether or not it is within our reach.
In a famous argument, the logician W. V. Quine showed that there
exist families of logically consistent interpretations and theories that can
match a given series of facts. Such insight should warn us that mere absence
of nonsense may not be sufficient to make something true.
Quine's problem is related to his finding difficulty in translating statements
between languages, simply because one could interpret any sentence
in an infinity of ways. (Note here that someone splitting hairs could find a
self-canceling aspect to Quine's own writing. I wonder how he expects us
to understand this very point in a noninfinity of ways).
This does not mean that we cannot talk about causes; there are ways
to escape the narrative fallacy. How? By making conjectures and running
experiments, or as we will see in Part Two (alas), by making testable predictions.*
The psychology experiments I am discussing here do so: they select
a population and run a test. The results should hold in Tennessee, in
China, even in France.
* Such tests avoid both the narrative fallacy and much of the confirmation bias, since
testers are obliged to take into account the failures as well as the successes of their
experiments.
THE NARRATIVE FALLACY 73
Narrative and Therapy
If narrativity causes us to see past events as more predictable, more expected,
and less random than they actually were, then we should be able
to make it work for us as therapy against some of the stings of randomness.
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. People in professions
with high randomness (such as in the markets) can suffer more than
their share of the toxic effect of look-back stings: I should have sold my
portfolio at the top; I could have bought that stock years ago for pennies
and I would now be driving a pink convertible; et cetera. If you are a professional,
you can feel that you "made a mistake," or, worse, that "mistakes
were made," when you failed to do the equivalent of buying the
winning lottery ticket for your investors, and feel the need to apologize for
your "reckless" investment strategy (that is, what seems reckless in retrospect).
How can you get rid of such a persistent throb? Don't try to willingly
avoid thinking about it: this will almost surely backfire. A more appropriate
solution is to make the event appear more unavoidable. Hey, it was
bound to take place and it seems futile to agonize over it. How can you do
so? Well, with 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.
If you work in a randomness-laden profession, as we see, you are likely
to suffer burnout effects from that constant second-guessing of your past
actions in terms of what played out subsequently. Keeping a diary is the
least you can do in these circumstances.
7 4 UMBERTO E C O ' S ANTILIBRARY
TO BE WRONG WITH INFINITE PRECISION
We harbor a crippling dislike for the abstract.
One day in December 2003, when Saddam Hussein was captured,
Bloomberg News flashed the following headline at 13:01: u.s. T R E A S
U R I E S R I S E ; H U S S E I N C A P T U R E M A Y N O T C U R B T E R R O R I S M .
Whenever there is a market move, the news media feel obligated to
give the "reason." Half an hour later, they had to issue a new headline. As
these U.S. Treasury bonds fell in price (they fluctuate all day long, so there
was nothing special about that), Bloomberg News had a new reason for
the fall: Saddam's capture (the same Saddam). At 13:31 they issued the
next bulletin: u.s. T R E A S U R I E S F A L L ; H U S S E I N C A P T U R E B O O S T S A L L
U R E O F R I S K Y A S S E T S .
So it was the same capture (the cause) explaining one event and its
exact opposite. Clearly, this can't be; these two facts cannot be linked.
Do media journalists repair to the nurse's office every morning to get
their daily dopamine injection so that they can narrate better? (Note the
irony that the word dope, used to designate the illegal drugs athletes take
to improve performance, has the same root as dopamine.)
It happens all the time: a cause is proposed to make you swallow the
news and make matters more concrete. After a candidate's defeat in an
election, you will be supplied with the "cause" of the voters' disgruntlement.
Any conceivable cause can do. The media, however, go to great
lengths to make the process "thorough" with their armies of fact-checkers.
It is as if they wanted to be wrong with infinite precision (instead of accepting
being approximately right, like a fable writer).
Note that in the absence of any other information about a person you
encounter, you tend to fall back on her nationality and background as a
salient attribute (as the Italian scholar did with me). How do I know that
this attribution to the background is bogus? I did my own empirical test
by checking how many traders with my background who experienced the
same war became skeptical empiricists, and found none out of twenty-six.
This nationality business helps you make a great story and satisfies your
hunger for ascription of causes. It seems to be the dump site where all explanations
go until one can ferret out a more obvious one (such as, say,
some evolutionary argument that "makes sense"). Indeed, people tend to
fool themselves with their self-narrative of "national identity," which, in a
breakthrough paper in Science by sixty-five authors, was shown to be
a total fiction. ("National traits" might be great for movies, they might
THE NARRATIVE FALLACY 75
help a lot with war, but they are Platonic notions that carry no empirical
validity—yet, for example, both the English and the non-English erroneously
believe in an English "national temperament.") Empirically, sex,
social class, and profession seem to be better predictors of someone's behavior
than nationality (a male from Sweden resembles a male from Togo
more than a female from Sweden; a philosopher from Peru resembles a
philosopher from Scotland more than a janitor from Peru; and so on).
The problem of overcausation does not lie with the journalist, but with
the public. Nobody would pay one dollar to buy a series of abstract statistics
reminiscent of a boring college lecture. We want to be told stories, and
there is nothing wrong with that—except that we should check more thoroughly
whether the story provides consequential distortions of reality.
Could it be that fiction reveals truth while nonfiction is a harbor for the
liar? Could it be that fables and stories are closer to the truth than is the
thoroughly fact-checked ABC News? Just consider that the newspapers
try to get impeccable facts, but weave them into a narrative in such a way
as to convey the impression of causality (and knowledge). There are factcheckers,
not intellect-checkers. Alas.
But there is no reason to single out journalists. Academics in narrative
disciplines do the same thing, but dress it up in a formal language—we
will catch up to them in Chapter 10, on prediction.
Besides narrative and causality, journalists and public intellectuals of
the sound-bite variety do not make the world simpler. Instead, they almost
invariably make it look far more complicated than it is. The next time you
are asked to discuss world events, plead ignorance, and give the arguments
I offered in this chapter casting doubt on the visibility of the immediate
cause. You will be told that "you overanalyze," or that "you are too complicated."
All you will be saying is that you don't know!
Dispassionate Science
Now, if you think that science is an abstract subject free of sensationalism
and distortions, I have some sobering news. Empirical researchers have
found evidence that scientists too are vulnerable to narratives, emphasizing
titles and "sexy" attention-grabbing punch lines over more substantive
matters. They too are human and get their attention from sensational matters.
The way to remedy this is through meta-analyses of scientific studies,
in which an iiberresearcher peruses the entire literature, which includes
the less-advertised articles, and produces a synthesis.
7 6 UMBERTO E C O ' S A N T I L I B R A RY
THE SENSATIONAL AND THE BLACK SWAN
Let us see how narrativity affects our understanding of the Black Swan.
Narrative, as well as its associated mechanism of salience of the sensational
fact, can mess up our projection of the odds. Take the following experiment
conducted by Kahneman and Tversky, the pair introduced in the
previous chapter: the subjects were forecasting professionals who were
asked to imagine the following scenarios and estimate their odds.
a. A massive flood somewhere in America in which more than a thousand
people die.
b. An earthquake in California, causing massive flooding, in which
more than a thousand people die.
Respondents estimated the first event to be less likely than the second.
An earthquake in California, however, is a readily imaginable cause, which
greatly increases the mental availability—hence the assessed probability—
of the flood scenario.
Likewise, if I asked you how many cases of lung cancer are likely to
take place in the country, you would supply some number, say half a million.
Now, if instead I asked you many cases of lung cancer are likely to
take place because of smoking, odds are that you would give me a much
higher number (I would guess more than twice as high). Adding the because
makes these matters far more plausible, and far more likely. Cancer
from smoking seems more likely than cancer without a cause attached to
it—an unspecified cause means no cause at all.
I return to the example of E. M. Forster's plot from earlier in this chapter,
but seen from the standpoint of probability. Which of these two statements
seems more likely?
Joey seemed happily married. He killed his wife.
Joey seemed happily married. He killed his wife to get her inheritance.
Clearly the second statement seems more likely at first blush, which is
a pure mistake of logic, since the first, being broader, can accommodate
more causes, such as he killed his wife because he went mad, because she
cheated with both the postman and the ski instructor, because he entered
a state of delusion and mistook her for a financial forecaster.
All this can lead to pathologies in our decision making. How?
Just imagine that, as shown by Paul Slovic and his collaborators, peoTHE
NARRATIVE FALLACY 77
pie are more likely to pay for terrorism insurance than for plain insurance
(which covers, among other things, terrorism).
The Black Swans we imagine, discuss, and worry about do not resemble
those likely to be Black Swans. We worry about the wrong "improbable"
events, as we will see next.
Black Swan Blindness
The first question about the paradox of the perception of Black Swans is
as follows: How is it that some Black Swans are overblown in our minds
when the topic of this book is that we mainly neglect Black Swans?
The answer is that there are two varieties of rare events: a) the narrated
Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you
are likely to hear about on television, and b) those nobody talks about,
since they escape models—those that you would feel ashamed discussing
in public because they do not seem plausible. I can safely say that it is entirely
compatible with human nature that the incidences of Black Swans
would be overestimated in the first case, but severely underestimated in
the second one.
Indeed, lottery buyers overestimate their chances of winning because
they visualize such a potent payoff—in fact, they are so blind to the
odds that they treat odds of one in a thousand and one in a million almost
in the same way.
Much of the empirical research agrees with this pattern of overestimation
and underestimation of Black Swans. Kahneman and Tversky initially
showed that people overreact to low-probability outcomes when you discuss
the event with them, when you make them aware of it. If you ask
someone, "What is the probability of death from a plane crash?" for instance,
they will raise it. However, Slovic and his colleagues found, in insurance
patterns, neglect of these highly improbable events in people's
insurance purchases. They call it the "preference for insuring against
probable small losses"—at the expense of the less probable but larger impact
ones.
Finally, after years of searching for empirical tests of our scorn of the
abstract, I found researchers in Israel that ran the experiments I had been
