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The Forum (BBC World Service) |
We all recall situations where our choice did not bring about the outcome we expected. This can happen to a couple planning a family, scientists predicting the result of a new experiment, politicians implementing a new policy to overcome a problem.
For each of these individual situations there may be specific reasons that explain why the outcome was unexpected, but I am interested in the general question, Why is it that our actions have unintended consequences? We can think about the issue of unintended consequences in terms of the capacities that would make it more likely for us as human agents to reliably predict the events our actions give rise to when we make decisions, reflecting on the wealth of empirical data coming from the psychological literature.
Being able to predict the outcomes of our actions would require good memory, sound reasoning, and effective deliberation. So, we could remember what consequences our previous actions have had, infer from our past experiences what consequences our future actions will be likely to have, and use this information when deciding on a course of action. Unfortunately, the recent psychological evidence suggests that the prospects for good memory, sound reasoning, and effective deliberation, even for those agents who are healthy and well-educated, are poor.