Unintended consequences

For the 1996 novel by John Ross, see Unintended Consequences.

Unintended consequences are situations where an action results in an outcome that is not (or not only) what is intended. The unintended results may be foreseen or unforeseen, but they should be the logical or likely results of the action. For example, it is often conjectured that if the Treaty of Versailles had not imposed such harsh conditions on Germany, World War II would not have occurred. As such, war was an unintended consequence of the Treaty of Versailles.

Unintended consequences can be classed into roughly three types:

• a positive unexpected benefit, usually referred to as serendipity or a windfall
• a potential source of problems, according to Murphy's law used in Systems engineering
• a negative or a perverse effect, which is the opposite result of what is intended

Discussions of unintended consequences usually refer to the third situation of perverse results. This situation often arises because a policy has a Perverse incentive and causes actions contrary to what is desired.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

The Law of Unintended Consequences has a feeble linguistic claim on the term "law". It is hardly a scientific law; even Murphy's law and natural law claim specific outcomes with some certainty. But this term persists as a solemn warning against certain disorder, that almost all human actions have at least one unintended consequence: "There shall be some unexpected result." In other words, each cause has more than one effect, and will include unforeseen effects. Less of a law or rule itself, it is more a call to rulers and law makers to beware.

History

The idea dates to the Scottish Enlightenment and consequentialism, or judging by results. In the twentieth century, sociologist Robert K. Merton once again popularized the concept, sometimes referred to as the Law of Unforeseen Consequences. Merton (1936) spoke of the "unanticipated consequences" of "purposive social action", emphasizing that his term "purposive action… [is exclusively] concerned with 'conduct' as distinct from 'behavior.' That is, with action that involves motives and consequently a choice between various alternatives" (p.895).

Causes

Possible causes of unintended consequences include the world's inherent complexity (parts of a system responding to changes in the environment), perverse incentives, human stupidity, self-deception or other cognitive or emotional biases.

Robert K. Merton listed five causes of unanticipated consequences:

1. Ignorance (It is impossible to anticipate everything, thereby leading to incomplete analysis)
2. Error (Incorrect analysis of the problem, or following habits that worked in the past but may not apply to the current situation)
3. Immediate interest, which may override long-term interests
4. Basic values may require or prohibit certain actions, even if the long-term result might be unfavorable (these long-term consequences may eventually cause changes in basic values)
5. Self-defeating prophecy (Fear of some consequence drives people to find solutions before the problem occurs, thus the non-occurrence of the problem is unanticipated)

Merton is also said to have stated that "no blanket statement categorically affirming or denying the practical feasibility of all social planning is warranted."

Examples

Of course, unintended consequences are common in everyday life, but many impact the greater society.

Examples of Unexpected Benefits:

• The medieval policy of setting up large hunting reserves for the nobility has preserved green space, often as parks, throughout England and other places in Europe.

• The wartime practice of sinking ships in shallow waters has created some artificial coral reefs.

• Controversial research carried out by John J. Donohue and Steven Levitt and published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics suggests that legalized abortion in the United States has accounted for as much as 50% of the drop in national crime rates. As evidence, Donohue and Levitt cite the fact that states that legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade saw correspondingly earlier drops in crime, and that states where abortion is common saw greater drops in crime than states where abortion is rare. Most convincingly, they found that "in high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states."

• Also controversially, it has been suggested that legalized abortion has led to fewer so-called 'crack babies'—children born with a drug dependency due to their mothers' drug use while pregnant. The availability of legal abortion makes it more likely that a drug-addicted mother will abort a fetus rendered unhealthy by her drug use, even if this is not a primary reason for her choice to abort. (Note: the theory that fetuses exposed to crack cocaine would become people prone to violence, crime or addiction has been proven false. Crack babies perform as well as their age cohorts and show no additional tendency to violence, crime or addiction. However, babies with Fetal alcohol syndrome often show mental delays and secondary disabilities such as a tendency to mental health problems, school problems, trouble with the law, and chemical abuse.)

• In medicine, most drugs have unintended consequences associated with their use, which are known as 'side effects'. Many are harmful and are more precisely called 'adverse effects'. However, some are beneficial—for instance, aspirin, a pain reliever, can also thin the blood and help to prevent heart attacks. The existence of beneficial side effects also leads to off label use—prescription or use of a drug for a non-intended purpose.

Examples of Perverse Results:

• The Streisand Effect occurs when an attempt to censor or remove a certain piece of information (such as photograph, file or website) instead causes the information in question to become widely known and distributed in a very short time. The fact that a piece of information is being restricted assigns to it a previously nonexistent value in the eyes of the public.

• John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln to avenge the defeat of the Confederacy. It is generally agreed that had Lincoln served out his presidential term until its proper end in March 1869, Reconstruction would have taken a considerably gentler course.

• The introduction of rabbits into Australia for sport led to an explosive growth in the rabbit population; rabbits became a major feral pest in Australia.

• Some economists believe that minimum wage laws increase the unemployment rate among low wage workers.

• The stiffening of penalties for driving while intoxicated in the United States in the 1980s led, at first, to an increase in hit and run accidents, most of which were believed to have been drunken drivers trying to escape the law (Later, penalties for leaving the scene of an accident when driving while intoxicated were stiffened, as well).

• Driven by concern for the increasing number of cyclists' head injuries, the State of Victoria (Australia) legislated to make safety helmets mandatory for all bicycle riders in 1990. Whilst the expected significant reduction in the absolute number of head injuries was certainly observed, there was also a concomitant, entirely unexpected reduction in the number of juvenile cyclists. Research by Vulcan et al. found that the reduction in the number of juvenile cyclists was entirely due to the fact that wearing a bicycle helmet was not considered to be fashionable or "cool".

• "Prohibition", in the 1920s U.S., originally enacted to suppress the alcohol trade, drove many small-time alcohol suppliers out of business and consolidated the hold of large-scale organized crime over the illegal alcohol industry. When Prohibition was repealed, the brewing industry was then concentrated in a few major brewers, which were able to ride it out. Sixty years later, the "War on Drugs," intended to suppress the illegal drug trade, likewise drove many small-time drug dealers out of business and consolidated the hold of organized drug cartels over the illegal drug industry. Additionally, it has led to the existence of street drugs of unknown strength and contamination; at least some drug-related (and particularly opiate-related) deaths are caused by accidental overdosing on drugs that a dealer neglected to dilute to the usual extent.

• In CIA jargon, "blowback" describes the unintended, even undesirable consequences of covert operations. Examples include:
  • Operation Ajax, which contributed to the 1979 Iranian Revolution & the Iran hostage crisis
  • Covert funding of the Contras in Nicaragua, which lead to the Iran-Contra Affair

• Attempts by governments to reduce rent by introducing rent control has led to the unintended consequence of housing shortages and reduction in housing quality, increased difficulty for less desirable renters to obtain or retain housing and even to the creation of slums—areas where rental property is allowed to run down until it becomes uninhabitable.

• Controversially, it has been argued that stronger gun control has caused places such as Washington DC and New Jersey to experience unexpected increases in crime. One possible reason is that the enactment of gun control laws leave citizens vulnerable to criminals who do not respect the prohibitions on gun ownership, thereby making crime a much safer occupation. Conversely, places such as Switzerland and Vermont are cited as examples of places where weapons are common (and, importantly, equally distributed), yet the crime rates are extraordinarily low.

• Another controversial position alleges that humanitarian aid to Third World nations increases rather than decreases third-world poverty. The logic behind this is that aid increases government power, destroys economic incentives, promotes unprofitable enterprises, and subsidizes misguided policies. [1]

• The locking of aircraft cockpit doors to prevent disasters through acts of terrorism resulted in Helios Airways Flight 522 crashing due to the pilots' loss of oxygen and the stewards' inability to control the craft.

• The United States' invasion of Iraq, intended to bring US influence into the area, increased the strength of nominal adversaries such as Iran, e.g., by eliminating the government of an oft-warring neighbor, and increasing hostility towards US presence in the area.

Failure mode and effects analysis

Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is a fault tree method (first developed for systems engineering) that examines potential failures in products or processes. It may be used to evaluate risk management priorities for mitigating known threat-vulnerabilities.

FMEA helps select remedial actions that reduce cumulative impacts of life-cycle consequences (risks) from a systems failure (fault).

Purposeful gaming to achieve unintended consequences

Another more restrictive use of unintended consequence is that it occurs when a mechanism that has been installed in the world with the intention of producing one result is used to produce a different (and often conflicting) result. The notion of "gaming the system" illustrates the idea of an unintended consequence. One "games a system" (for example, the tax code) when one acts in such a way that one gains tax advantages by exploiting a tax rule that was intended for some other purpose. Similarly, computer viruses, worms, and other such plagues are unintended consequences of the way certain computer systems are designed. Spam is an unintended consequence of the way the email system works. The preceding computer examples illustrate this sense of unintended consequence in that a mechanism, e.g., email, intended for interpersonal communication, is hijacked for advertising.

This sense of unintended consequence excludes, for example, the proliferation of rabbits in Australia as an unintended consequence of their introduction. The proliferation of rabbits was indeed an unexpected (and unintended) consequence of their introduction, but it didn't result from the exploitation of a mechanism for some other purpose. It was just a consequence of a historical event. Many historical events have such unexpected (and unintended) consequences, but are not considered to exemplify this use of the term. The intent to "game the system" distinguishes this interpretation of unintended consequence from such a broader interpretation of unintended consequence as a result of simple historical contingency. See the Museum of Unintended Consequences for more examples.

Solution or mitigating actions

The concepts of interlock research and Information Routing Group were proposed to overcome the effects of this Law by ensuring that, as far as possible, unknown consequences of any proposed action or policy (at least to the initiators of the action or policy) was fed back to them by a spontaneously forming network of experts who could see what those consequences would be.

An associated concept was that of the Relevance Paradox, where an actor would seek out information that was obviously relevant, but that they did not see as relevant although it might well be.

See also

• Counter-intuitive
• Futures techniques
• Hutber's law
• Kludge
• Moral hazard
• Murphy's law
• Nocebo
• Perverse effects of vaccination
• Perverse incentive
• Placebo
• Placebo (origins of technical term)
• Regression testing
• Side effect
• Streisand effect
• Unforeseen effects of species introduction
• Parable of the broken window

External links

• The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action by Robert K. Merton, American Sociological Review, Vol 1 Issue 6, Dec 1936, pp.894-904
• Atlantic magazine article: "Blowback"
• Observer article: Why 'blowback' is the hidden danger of war
• MSNBC article on Bin Laden and blowback
• Unintended Consequences
• Museum of Unintended Consequences
• Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, Vantage Books, 1997.
• Tomislav V. Kovandzic, John Sloan III, and Lynne M. Vieraitis. Unintended Consequences of Politically Popular Sentencing Policy: The Homicide-Promoting Effects of 'Three Strikes' in U.S. Cities (1980-1999). Criminology & Public Policy, Vol 1, Issue 3, July 2002.
• Vulcan, A.P., Cameron, M.H. & Heiman, L., "Evaluation of mandatory bicycle helmet use in Victoria, Australia", 36th Annual Conference Proceedings, Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine, Oct 5-7, 1992.
• Vulcan, A.P., Cameron, M.H. & Watson, W.L., "Mandatory Bicycle Helmet Use: Experience in Victoria, Australia", World Journal of Surgery, Vol.16, No.3, (May/June 1992), pp.389-397.
• knock-on effect