Narrative fallacy

What it is

Weaving scattered facts into a tidy cause-and-effect story, and trusting the story because it is coherent rather than because it is true.

Related

• Hindsight bias bias
  Once we know how things ended, a neat story explains why, and we feel it was inevitable.
• Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy
  We link events in a tidy causal story, which post hoc reasoning then treats as explanation.
• Clustering illusion bias
  Both create order from randomness: stories link events, clustering links data points.
• Conjunction fallacy fallacy
  A richer, more coherent story feels likelier although each added detail makes it less probable.
• Fallacy of the single cause fallacy
  A single-cause explanation makes a clean story, which is what story bias rewards.
• Personification bias
  Giving things intentions makes stories easy to tell.
• Reification fallacy
  Treating "the market" or "history" as an agent makes a simple narrative possible.

Appears in

• The 99 thinking errors in Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly#13: Story bias

References

• Wikipedia: Narrative fallacy en.wikipedia.org
• The 99 thinking errors in Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: List of cognitive biases en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: Cognitive bias codex en.wikipedia.org

More in “What it means: finding patterns and stories”