Narrative Fallacy Quotes

Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory is downright creative.

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.

The more Ronald Reagan repeated a story, the more he believed it and the more he resisted information that undermined premises.

I'm so suspicious of our own understanding of the past. I just think that your mind plays absolute tricks on you and fools you every minute of every day. And so when you're talking about the past, you're talking about something that never happened. At least it didn't happen the way you think it happened.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

When I pick a story, I'm very much aware of the larger issues that it's illuminating. But one of the things that I, as a writer, feel strongly about is that nobody is representative. That's just narrative nonsense. People may be part of a larger story or structure or institution, but they're still people. Making them representative loses sight of that. Which is why a lot of writing about low-income people makes them into saints, perfect in their suffering.

Once you create a self-justifying storyline, your emotional entrapment within it quadruples.

There's a tendency when we write history to do it with the power of hindsight and then assume almost god-like knowledge that nobody living through history has.

Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity.

Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not.

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.

Narrative drives most of economics. Everything seems to be part of a story, and how that story is told often leads to critical error.