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Avoiding Narrative Fallacy to Optimize Decision-Making
Connecting the dots is sometimes easier, but often leads us far astray.
Key points
- Narrative fallacy developed so we can make quick guesses without all the facts.
- Narrative fallacy allows us to “connect the dots” but is often inaccurate.
- Knowing when we can take shortcuts and when we need to slow down and do the work is key.
Recently I’ve been deep-diving into a model of brain, mind, and behavior-active inference and the free energy principle-developed by a leading neuroscientist and computational psychiatrist Karl Friston, one of the world’s greatest minds [1].
Through these investigations, I had the pleasure of meeting Alexey Tolchinsky, a clinical psychologist and researcher who originally studied physics in his undergraduate program and later on pursued a doctorate in clinical psychology. He is one of the authors investigating the clinical practice of psychology and psychiatry using the framework of dynamical systems, including Chaos Theory. He currently is working on papers exploring depersonalization and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
In this interview, we focus on “narrative fallacy,” which helps explain a common way people create misleading inferences by filling in the blanks in the data too quickly. Stated differently, narrative fallacy happens when people prematurely create a coherent story from disconnected bits and pieces of information. This is one of the ways we often get ourselves into avoidable trouble, going beyond “jumping to conclusions” to become a way of approaching the world. Conversely, finding ways to mitigate the effects of narrative fallacies may lead to more accurate and adaptive inferences, and, in turn, to better clinical outcomes, and more generally to think through key decisions with greater clarity.
GHB: What is narrative fallacy?
AT: Narrative fallacy is connecting the details or events into a coherent story form while we do not know if these details are connected. Often, we come up with a causal story. For example, let us imagine that John’s common cold symptoms disappeared one week after they started, and he has been washing his hands every…
