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How Narrative Fallacies are Affecting Your Life
Change your stories, change your life
Lately, I’ve been writing some posts and I’ve noticed a pattern. Whether I’m talking about travel, self-improvement, or exercise, the concept of narrative fallacy has become a recurrent theme.
I first came across this concept while reading Antifragile by Nassim Taleb, it felt like a revelation. It was one of those moments when the pin drops and you think “Why wasn’t I told about this before?”
Narrative fallacy is the human tendency to concoct a story based on random, unconnected events. Our need for explanations, reasons, and cause and effect, makes us see events as stories. We prefer a good story, even if it’s a fabrication, rather than accept that most facts don’t connect to each other .
We see patterns where there are only dots.
There is an experiment in psychology by Heider & Simmel in which the participants are asked to interpret what is happening when they are shown two triangles and a square moving inside a rectangle. Most of the subjects attributed intentions to the figural units as if they were sentient beings — that circle is a bully, that little triangle is hiding from it, and so on — when there was no intention, and no explanation, it was just dots moving about randomly and no ulterior motive.
