The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
Have you ever had the experience of buying a new car, let’s say a red Mazda truck and then you start seeing red Mazda trucks everywhere? David McRaney gives a good example of this phenomenon from his website, You Are Not So Smart.com. He states, “Say you go on a date, and the other person reveals they drive the same kind of car you do. It’s a different color, but the same model. Well, that’s sort of neat, but nothing amazing. Let’s say later on you learn their mom’s name is the same as your mom’s, and your mothers have the same birthday. Hold on a second. That’s pretty cool. Maybe the hand of fate is pushing you toward the other person. Later still, you find out you both own the box set of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and you both grew up loving Rescue Rangers. You both love pizza, but hate rutabagas. This is meant to be, you think. You are made for each other.”
If you have ever experienced something like the examples above, you have just experienced the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. McRaney explains:
The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
The Misconception: People take randomness into account when determining cause and effect.
The Truth: People tend to ignore random chance when the results seem meaningful or when you want a random event to have a meaningful cause.
The fallacy gets its name from a cowboy shooting at a barn. He shoots at the barn and after a while the barn is riddled with bullet holes. Then, the cowboy goes over and paints a bull’s eye on a cluster of bullet holes that makes it appear he’s a better shot than he really is. By doing this he gives some type of order to the randomness of the holes.
The human desire to find meaning in chaos is the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. Trying to find meaning in life is a profoundly human construct.
The Brain is a Great Big O’ Pattern Makin’ Machine
Our human brains seek order and pattern in randomness this all of the time. Picking out clusters of coincidence is a predictable malfunction of normal human logic.
Seeing faces in clouds or an image of the Virgin Mary in your morning toast are two examples of the human tendency to bring order and meaning to the random.
In Texas speak, the brain is one Great Big O’ massive pattern makin’ machine. It looks for patterns everywhere. And, from an evolutionary perspective that is a good thing. Our ability to recognize patterns is how we learned what plants and animals to eat as cavemen and to recognize our tribe from another tribe. Pattern recognition plays a leading role in learning to talk and read. In fact, optical character recognition (OCR) software that came with your scanner is based on a simplified model of the neural networks in our brains. Neural networks and pattern-making are also part of our social DNA. People seek order and pattern related to interactions with each other. This is a kind of an emotional contagion.
Graham Stoney points out in his “A Practical Guide to How Your Brain Works,” that “[t]houghts, feelings, ideas, and behaviors are all contagious. This explains a great deal of group dynamics including the Mexican wave at the football game, and why many people blindly follow charismatic leaders. Peer pressure combines with empathy to have an enormously strong influence on us because it stems from a social survival mechanism in the brain. We tend to underestimate how strong this biological drive wired deeply into our brain is. This basic need to connect with any consciousness outside of ourselves is so strong that it overflows into other areas of our lives and can give rise to a great spiritual yearning. Jung’s need for a collective consciousness is a reflection of it.”
McRaney notes, “If hindsight bias (looking back you knew it all along) and confirmation bias (seeking information that only supports your bias) had a baby, it would be the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. These biases find a narrative in all the mundane moments, extracting the good bits and tossing aside the rest. This means they can create any orderly story they wish from their reserves of chaos. Was that one girl really a horrific bitch? Was that guy with the tattoos really that dumb? Unless you can pull back and see the entire barn, you’ll never know. The powerlessness, the feeling you are defenseless to the whims of chance, can be assuaged by singling out an antagonist. Sometimes you need a bad guy, and The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy is one way you can create one.”
However, in regards to homeland security, emergency management or risk perception, the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy takes cause and effect to a larger level of concern.
Implications for the Security and Risk Arts
Whenever practitioners of the security and risk arts practice critical thinking, red teaming or the ISO 31000 risk process, they are trying to avoid the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. Practitioners are fighting against the natural tendency to find order and pattern in disorder to assuage their pattern-making brains.
Nobel prize winners, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky give an example of this in their book, “Thinking Fast and Slow,” as “In World War II, Londoners took notice when bombing raids consistently missed certain neighborhoods. People began to believe German spies lived in the spared buildings. They didn’t. Analysis afterward by Kahneman and Tversky showed the bombing strike patterns were random.”
The Texas-sharpshooter fallacy is the name epidemiologists give to the clustering illusion, thereby giving the illusion of a causal connection between some environmental factor and the disease. When evaluating disease some epidemiologists must counteract their propensity to isolate clusters of diseases from their context, thereby giving the illusion of a causal connection between some environmental factor and the disease. The scientifically disproven link between vaccines is a clustering illusion and another Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. A more recent example involves the invasion of Iraq, alleging weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was due to cognitive bias of overconfidence, lack of critical analysis and seeing patterns where there were none.
McRaney sums it up in his post, “[t]o admit the messy slog of chaos, disorder and random chance rules your life, rules the universe itself, and is a painful conceit. You commit the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy when you need a pattern to provide meaning, to console you, to lay blame. You mow your lawn, arrange your silverware, comb your hair. Whenever possible, you oppose the forces of entropy and thwart their relentless derangement. Your drive to do this is primal. You need order. Order makes it easier to be a person, to navigate this sloppy world. You are born looking for clusters where chance events have built up like sand into dunes.”
The website Spurious Correlations hosts some hilarious examples of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. For example, “The divorce rate in Maine correlates with the per capita consumption of cheese: are depressed Maine divorcees binging on cheese?”
Conclusion
Practitioners in the security and risk arts would do well to educate themselves regarding errors in judgment and thinking. The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy and other biases have profound implications in the way practitioners make life altering decisions about human life and critical infrastructure preservation.
Angi English has a Master’s in Security Studies from the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security and a Master’s in Educational Psychology from Baylor University. She lives in Austin, Texas.
