THINKER'S ALMANAC - April 17

How did a study which asked subjects to judge the quality of nylon stockings confirm the fact that humans are great storytellers?

Subject:  Narrative Fallacy - Nylon Stocking Study

Event:  The Back Swan published, 2007

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. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.  —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

On this day in 2007, trader-philosopher-statistician Nassim Taleb published The Black Swan:  The Impact of the Highly Improbable.  The book focuses on rare or unpredictable events -- what Taleb calls Black Swans -- and the ways in which we construct explanations for these events after the fact.

In the book, Taleb also discusses a concept he coined called the narrative fallacy, which explains the human tendency to construct stories that help us make sense of our world.

Humans love stories.  Long before science came along, we constructed elaborate narrative myths to explain the world.  These myths are excellent evidence of not only how much we love stories but also how our brains are wired to make sense of cause and effect.  In the absence of a clear cause, we will manufacture a story that explains the effect.  Just as we dream in narratives at night when our conscious mind goes dark, stories are our preferred, default mode for receiving and giving information.  Whether it's our own life stories or a larger national narrative, such as the attacks of 9/11, our brains have an amazing knack for synthesizing an abundance of information and details into a neat, often single-cause, narrative.

Being cognizant of the narrative fallacy helps us understand our audience’s hunger for narrative when we are making a presentation or writing an email.  This awareness should also make us wary of simple-story explanations.  George Washington may have been an honest man, but did he really confess to cutting down the cherry tree as a boy, exclaiming, “I cannot tell a lie.”  

The truth is when it comes to stories, we are all liars, weaving coherent stories as shortcuts to the whole truth.  Even worse, we frequently believe our own lies.  We want the world to make sense, and simple stories are easy to construct and easy to believe.  

In a famous 1970s study, subjects were asked to judge the quality of nylon stockings.  Four stockings were laid out before the subjects, but unbenounced to them, all the stockings were exactly the same. Viewing each stocking in order from left to right, 12% selected the first as the best, 17% the second, 31% the third, and 40% the last and most recently viewed.  When asked to explain their choice, the subjects produced over 80 different reasons for their choice, such as knit, weave, sheerness, elasticity, or workmanship.  In no cases, however, did they attribute their choice to the position of the stocking or to how recently they viewed them.

The stocking study helps to explain the concept of ‘confabulation,’ a word derived from the same root as the word ‘fable.’ In an effort to explain an effect or a choice, we confabulate a plausible narrative to explain what happened.  Although we make an effort to tell a true story, we tell a fictional one, and we are not consciously aware that we are deceiving our audience or ourselves (1).

A classic example of the narrative bias and confabulation in action comes from the play “Twelves Angry Men.”  A supposed eyewitness to a murder testifies that he saw the accused -- the murdered man’s son -- fleeing in the apartment hallway after the murder.  After analyzing the man’s testimony, however, the jurors begin to doubt his story.  After demonstrating that the elderly witness, who walked with a limp, would have needed 15 seconds to get to his door in order to see the fleeing murderer, the jurors conclude that the witness must have confabulated his story; not intending to deceive the court, the witness convinced himself that he saw the boy who lived upstairs fleeing even though he never reached the door in time to see anything.

In sum, we should understand the double-edged nature of narrative.  It’s great for communicating information and for captivating an audience; however, at the same time it is a highly unreliable method for packaging truth, prone to error, oversimplification, and self-deception.

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What is the narrative fallacy, and how did the sock study reveal how it works?

Challenge  - Bias for BS: In his book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, Jonathan Gottschall confirms what Nassim Taleb says about the narrative fallacy:

The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.

Reflect honestly on your own life experience.  Looking back can you identify a specific instance where you might have been guilty of conflating some facts and constructing a false narrative.  What happened, and how does it confirm the existence of the narrative fallacy?

Sources:

1-Bortolotti, Lisa. Confabulations:  Why Telling Ourselves Stories Makes Us Feel Ok. Aeon 13 Feb. 2018.