4 Ways To Safeguard Ourselves From The Unintended Consequences of Our Actions

Every action we take has a consequence

People think there’s always a simple way to solve any problem, big or small. Yet, they never consider the fact that a solution always creates new problems.

Take China, for instance.

Mao Zedong thought he had a simple solution to the overpopulation problem: every family would only be allowed to have one child.

But in China, every family wants a boy. It’s a culture that prides itself in carrying on the family’s name and lineage. If they had a baby girl, they would get rid of her so they could try again.

In 1997, the World Health Organisation (WHO) claimed:

“More than 50 million women were estimated to be ‘missing’ because of the institutionalised killing and neglect of girls due to Beijing’s population control programme.”

Most of these girls were abandoned. The unintended consequences of population control? There are more men needing wives than there are wives for them.

The WHO continues:

“Over the next 20 years, a predicted excess of 10–20% of young men will emerge in large parts of China who cannot find wives. These marriageable-age husbands-to-be are known as ‘gung gun’: ‘bare branches’ or ‘bare sticks.’”

These are the kind of unintended consequences no one thinks about when having large sweeping ideas.

Here’s another one from China. It’s about traffic accidents turning into murder.

When a motorist hits a pedestrian, they will reverse over them to make sure they’re dead. Sounds ridiculous right?

Again the Chinese government makes a law without bothering to think about the consequences. They thought they could reduce the number of crashes in China by scaring the population. So they put into law, that if you hit someone you had to pay for them whilst they were recovering.

But Chinese people are very practical when it comes to money.

What if the person they hit, pretended to be or was seriously ill for years? Or for life? They didn’t want to be paying out money with no end in sight. Yet, if the person died at the scene of the accident they only had to pay up once. So in terms of financial damage, it made more sense to finish them off.

In 2013, China’s largest newspaper group, The People’s Daily, quoted a truck driver saying:

“The idea that it is better to hit to kill than hit to injure has already become an unspoken rule in our profession. Each of us is just about able to pay the compensation required for hitting and killing a person, but I’m afraid that not everyone can pay the compensation for hitting and injuring a person.”

The compensation for crippling or putting a person into a vegetative state could be bottomless. It’s reported the average compensation for death was around $50,000. But one man who’d been disabled in a crash received $400,000 over 23 years.

This “cure is worse than poison” problems are everywhere if you pay attention. In the example above it’s a government failing to make clear decisions. But even we make similar mistakes in our own lives.

The Paradox Of Playing It Safe

Our worst decisions always feel like good decisions in the moment. It never feels horrible. That’s why we make them. This happens because we’re solving short-term, emotional problems. And not considering the long-term consequential effects.

We make these poor decisions because our brains filter out biases when acting impulsively. We’re wired to experience the world in a skewed way. Which means our perceptions rarely reflect reality.

The reasons why we suffer at the mercy of the Law of Unintended Consequences are for a few reasons:

• We are biased towards dealing with what we see as immediate threats, rather than addressing greater long-term risks.
• We are biased towards focusing our attention on the tangible rather than the abstract.
• We are biased towards dramatic events. For example, you’re more likely to die driving than from a plane crash. But when a plane crash happens, it is so dramatic and terrifying it causes far more anxiety for people.
• We are bad at considering second-order and third-order effects.
• Consequences have compounding effects and we’re bad at understanding compound interest.

When something is scary, immediate and tangible, our biases kick in. They interfere with our ability to judge the situation accurately. Thinking through second-order consequences is mentally taxing. When we’re emotional about a subject, we struggle to expend the effort to think through the potential consequences.

How To Avoid The Law Of Unintended Consequences

We can’t 100% safeguard ourselves against the Law of Unintended Consequences and the cognitive biases that cause it. But there are some mental models you can apply to your decision making to help you with your own decisions.

1. Sometimes, do nothing.

A lot of our bad decisions is a result of impatience. When faced with a tough problem, ask yourself, “If I do nothing, will this get better?”

We often overestimate how much we can control a situation and underestimate the value of waiting. Often, the best and most difficult decision in life is to do nothing.

2. What’s the worst-case scenario?

We tend to think our ideas are the best ideas. We’re good at seeing the benefits and terrible at seeing the pitfalls. After all, they’re our ideas. And so we guard and defend it with our lives because we are the geniuses that came up with them. But be careful we ourselves are the easiest people to fool.

So it’s good practice to ask yourself What’s the worst possible scenario? How can this go wrong?

Write out the best-case scenario and worst-case scenario, then assign a probability to each case.

To ensure more safety, double the probability.

3. Can your decision have the unintended opposite effect?

In 1993, Federal securities regulators forced companies to reveal details about the salaries of their CEOs. The changes were intended to make boards think twice about approving unjust compensation packages.

But it had an unintended opposite effect.

Since then, the average pay for CEOs of large companies has quadrupled. By revealing to CEOs what their industry peers were receiving, they demanded high compensation.

4. Is this decision reversible?

We don’t often consider the reversibility of our decisions. If you buy a book you don’t like you can always return it and get your money back. But if you have a child, well there’s no going back. Some decisions are easy to undo. Some are incredibly difficult or impossible to undo.

Yet we don’t spend enough time considering what is difficult to undo and spend more time worrying about what can be easily undone.

A good rule of thumb: if a decision is not permanent, act fast. If a decision is permanent, act slow.

Essentially, the law of unintended consequences is just another term for acknowledging our inevitable blind spots in decision making. We don’t know what we don’t know. As much as we try to expand our attention and knowledge, we will inevitably succumb to failures of foresight and care.

For as long we’re able to think and breathe, we will continue to be wrong. But that’s never a reason to not try and be a bit better every day.