(featured image:Jonathan Cutrer/Flickr Public Domain)
… because it is rare for just one thing to be different
You may have missed (or forgotten) it during the COVID-19 pandemic, but at the end of January 2021 Britain finally left the EU, more than four years after this step was decided in a referendum. In the midst of the disruption (not least to travel) that characterized this period, the effects of this momentous event were minor. But this spring, as travel restrictions melted away like the winter frost, Britons were travelling to warmer climes again, and ran into an experience that was quite different from what they had been used to.
The peak holiday season is still to come, but even during this Easter break, travellers between the UK and Spain were already complaining about “2-hour long queues” at passport control (as they can no longer use the automatic gates), and about not being able to travel with a passport that is too old. And it was not only the travellers who were inconvenienced. British expatriates in Spain, who had been enjoying the equivalence of their British driving licence with the Spanish equivalent while the UK was in the EU, found that things had changed for them too. As the grace period after Brexit expired on 30 April, they were no longer allowed to legally drive using their British licence.
More than one difference
These are illustrations of what we might call the ceteris paribus fallacy, the thinking error of wrongly assuming that, when we consider a difference between two things, it is the only difference, and that everything else is the same. Many who voted for Brexit because they were convinced that having more control over laws and policy was a good thing, may not have considered that it also meant that travel to the EU would be affected, and that they’d be treated no different from people with a Vietnamese, Nigerian or Peruvian passport.
Something else that caught my eye recently is the aftermath of what has been termed the Great Resignation – the para- and post-pandemic realization of many workers that they didn’t quite like their job, their boss, or their colleagues, and quit in droves. With plenty of vacancies that looked (and in particular paid) much better, the choice was easily made. However, a poll in the US during March of this year found that around 1 in 5 regret leaving their job in the last two years, and a similar number are “remorseful about starting their new job”. Only 26% say they like their new job enough to stay.
Sometimes our erroneous assumption that the ceteris are paribus may be accidental. If we are naïve or ignorant, we may overlook the possibility that not everything else is the same, and hence implicitly assume that it will be. But sometimes that one difference we see is so salient that it stops us even considering possible other differences. For most of our ancestors, that was an adaptive tendency. They evolved to be able to distinguish what was beneficial (nutritious food, a suitable mate) from what was less so, based on just a few characteristics. (Similarly, they didn’t wait around until they had thoroughly examined an approaching potential predator – if they could recognize them on a single feature, they could take flee at once.) We, their heirs, still possess this ability, but in our complex environment, whatever is salient in our eyes is not necessarily a good predictor of whether it is good or bad.
What can also play a role is motivated reasoning and wishful thinking. When we perceive that someone else is being treated more favourably than we are, it may serve our case that all else is being equal. Even small children are good at this: if one of their siblings is receiving a reward and they are not, they may object to this blatant inequality (while ignoring the fact that, in contrast to them, the sibling actually completed a chore). If, as a grown-up, we vote for Brexit or decide to resign and get another job, we may wish that the benefits of EU membership, or the pleasant aspects of our current workplace will not change, but wishes are not reality.
The grass is greener, and what else is different?
We have known this all along, of course. The old idiom, “the grass is always greener on the other side”, doesn’t say so in so many words, but it implies that, while the grass may be greener, that is not the whole story. Maybe (unlike you) the neighbours are spending a lot of time, effort and money watering and feeding their lawn. Perhaps the soil on which this grass grows so greenly is so unstable that the slow subsidence is leaving the neighbours’ house full of cracks. Or that particular kind of grass maybe greener than green all right, but it is also so spiky that you need thick-soled sandals to avoid puncturing your feet when walking about in the summer.
When we compare our current situation with an alternative one – either someone else’s, or a hypothetical future one for ourselves – our emotions inevitable take part. Even if all we do is to simply enumerate and describe all the differences, we cannot help instinctively making judgements about which aspects are better or worse.
However, if one aspect of the alternative particularly appeals to us (or if we are particularly disenchanted by one aspect in our current situation), our fixation on that characteristic may activate the ceteris paribus fallacy. House too large and too cumbersome to keep clean and tidy? Let’s move to a smaller one! (And assume we will still have space for all our stuff). Waste too much time commuting? Work from home! (And assume that we will still be able to enjoy the informal relationships and the serendipitous conversations with our colleagues.) And purchasing something pricey that we deeply desire may leave us assuming that this will not affect our savings or push us over our monthly budget, and get us into financial trouble.
When the advantage of a positive difference grabs hold of our attention, there is little left for anything else. Even if we realize that there will be some other, not so positive, differences, we are not safe from the ceteris paribus fallacy: we simply dismiss them as irrelevant and insignificant, and forget about them.
Yet, there is a simple, alternative way of reasoning to avoid falling for this misconception, with just one difference. All we need to do is to ask ourselves, “what else is different”? So, why don’t we reason like this as a matter of course? Because here too, there is another difference. Confronting this question shatters the illusion that it is possible to have our cake and eat it, to make changes without making sacrifices. And that is often a difference too many…
Koenfucius 