Proportionality Bias: Our Broken Attempt to Give Order to Chaos

Life is fragile and absurd.- Leo Tolstoy

The fragile nature of our existence is unsettling.

Whether or not we’re aware of it, most of us live in a subtle denial of the fact that our lives could completely change in the blink of an eye and without our control.

This is not a pleasant reality, but still a reality.

Trigger Warning: Violent Imagery…

A squirrel crossing the street could send a driver swerving into oncoming traffic and colliding with a school bus full of children.

This random act could leave dozens of families destroyed.

A squirrel’s random decision to cross a street can create shockwaves that impact hundreds of people.

This is not fun to think about.

As a father of 4, the story above makes me beyond uncomfortable.

Our minds hate discomfort. We will perform gold medal-worthy mental gymnastics to avoid it.

First, we try not to dwell on these negative thoughts of uncertainty and our lack of control.

If that doesn’t work and we can’t ease the discomfort, we try to change the narrative to one that fills the gaps and makes us more comfortable.

Enter proportionality bias.

We simply can’t accept that the huge outcome had such a small cause. The squirrel being a squirrel is not helping us ease our discomfort.

So, we come up with reasons to explain the catastrophe that make us feel like we have more control.

“The driver wasn’t paying attention!” — We now feel like we have more control because we know that we pay attention, and most drivers do as well. There is now a culprit, and it isn’t randomness.

“The driver should have just stayed in the lane and hit the squirrel; what a stupid decision!” — We aren’t stupid! This sort of thing wouldn’t happen to us because we know better. We’d also never let our kids drive with someone as stupid as this person!

And… dismount!

9.5/10 on the mental gymnastics floor routine (8.1 from the Russians).

What Is Proportionality Bias

Proportionality bias is a tendency to believe that the causes of an event are proportional to effects in magnitude.

Extreme events with momentous outcomes have extreme, momentous causes. Ordinary events have ordinary causes.

This is a harmful bias because, in reality, a big action doesn’t at all need a big cause.

We’d like it to have one, of course, but the forces of nature and happenstance aren’t controlled by what we’d like.

You know that.

I know that.

However, our subconscious mind doesn’t like to accept it, so it tells stories and reaches for supporting evidence to validate them.

Our minds run with possibilities to over-explain what’s really going on.

A solution that has something that we can defeat, prevent, or control.

Something we can do to avoid a similar, negative outcome.

A villain perhaps, like a corrupt government or a mistake by a large group of unintelligent people.

We are much more intelligent than other people who have these sorts of horrible outcomes… It happens to them, not us…

You could choke on a grape and die, but an earthquake overnight might not even wake you up.

There is no law of nature that states that cause magnitude must equal cause effect magnitude.

This goes against the laws of physics, stating “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

Unfortunately, this isn’t physics.

Of course, cause and outcome magnitude often align, and that’s pleasing and acceptable, but it’s not a rule.

A smoker who gets lung cancer is far less disturbing to our psyche than the non-smoking vegan health nut who gets it.

The bank robber who is shot and killed by an off-duty police officer is much easier to accept than a bank teller who was killed by a bank robber.

If you do something of extreme magnitude like an armed robbery; you receive an extreme result; you get killed.

If you do something of little magnitude like show up to your job as a bank teller on time and get killed… The mind doesn’t like that.

More Examples of Proportionality Bias

One of the most common examples of proportionality bias mentioned in research and publications on the topic is the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

The then president’s untimely and brutal death was difficult for the nation to swallow.

That a single gunman could pull a trigger and send an entire nation into chaos was just too much for many people to accept.

How could one person’s choice impact millions of good people?!?

The cause simply didn’t match the outcome. For an entire nation to feel pain, we needed something BIGGER. Enter the JFK assassination conspiracy theories.

It was the mob…

It was an inside job by a corrupt government…

Even aliens weren’t out of the realm of possibility.

It just HAD to be bigger than a lone gunman. It had to be.

But it didn’t.

Sadly, there’s no connection between the size of an outcome and the size of the cause.

Studies involving a similar but fictitious scenario when an assassination attempt was made on a president showed that participants were more likely to suspect a conspiracy when the assassination was completed and less likely to suspect if the assassin missed the shot.

What changed the opinion?

The missed shot had no big outcome and, therefore, didn’t need a big cause to explain.

We can accept that a crazy person shot at the president and missed without a grand explanation, but if that bullet hits and kills him (or her someday), we need more.

It’s ok, though.

This bias is part of what keeps us sane.

You’re not crazy or ignorant for having this bias or any others. They’re a survival mechanism ingrained in all of us.

Usually, it’s harmless. But sometimes, it’s extremely dangerous and destructive.

The Solution

The solution to proportionality bias (and any bias, really) is mindfulness and unbiased reflection of our own beliefs.

We should be skeptical of our early assumptions and beliefs of anything of true significance.

If we accept we are not immune to irrational assumptions and are open to the idea that PERHAPS we are falling victim to our subconscious desires to form reality rather than accept it, we can make better decisions.

“Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.” ― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays

Side Note: Some of what I’ve discussed here could be attributed to the “Self-Serving Bias” or the “Fundamental Attribution Error” depending on the context and who you ask. There’s no test or quiz here after this, so I’m not worried about the specific terminology as much as the underlying psychological explanations. Keep this in mind if you’re using this article in any academic paper with a picky professor :)