How humans experience time has an interesting characteristic in common with the Arrow of Time in physics, namely that time goes one way. We are super into chronologies and storytelling because order of events matters quite a bit.
If you take how language works, it’s easy to break down things like stories and then paragraphs and then sentences to see that order matters so much that it doesn’t make sense any other way.
We can interpret this sentence easily.
One not but this.
(That’s “But not this one.” with the order of the words changed)
If that sounds like it makes sense so far, it doesn’t. It’s a fact of English that word order is fixed, but in other languages word order matters differently, or not at all. Brains so like a story though that it’s hard to resist one.
Continuing the discussion of how a language experience can “feel”, today my spiel is about how we tell stories to explain what we’re experiencing. It’s just how people work. When we have a reason to believe something, it becomes easier, and stories construct and arrange elements of a narrative with the purpose of the story being accepted and believed.
As a species, we don’t like things happening without explanation, and we don’t like randomness. This isn’t unique to humans. Gazelles don’t like it either. When the cheetahs aren’t there they can relax and pronk.
Once we have observed this “narrativity” as some have called it, it’s difficult to avoid its influence on your beliefs. The story doesn’t make something true, especially if the story you’re telling is something that could be, as in a design you’re proposing. But when the design is also intended to result in a thing you want, it starts to feel true in advance.
Our beliefs are so powerful, triggering emotions, memories, and physical responses it’s hard to ignore them. The part of our brain that has seen really convincing stories – the sun appearing to rise and set every day of your life, regardless of what you know about orbits and the solar system – can intervene to help create a belief that a story being good is the result of causality. This is where we get into trouble.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb says on page 70 of Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable:
“[…like causality, narrativity has a chronological dimension and leads to the perception of the flow of time. Causality makes time flow in a single direction, and so does narrativity. […] It is literally impossible to ignore posterior information when solving a problem. This simple inability to remember not the true sequence of events, but a reconstructed one will make history appear in hindsight to be far more explainable than it actually was – or is.”
This can create problems both in design and interpreting results. If we really believe something’s true that led to our design, and as a result something going to happen, when we’re designing we might focus on data, research and details that agree with our hypothesis. Later, if we’re not successful as anticipated, if we still believe our own story we often look for an explanation other than we were wrong about our design.
Especially if it was hard, expensive, or took a long time, it tempting to search for a new data point that allows your story to be true. Sunk costs are real, and are hard to get in front of again. Iterating a lot on interactions early in your process, you can often avoid beginning to believe causality is the result of fact, as opposed to a really good story you’ve told yourself.