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Everyone has been in a situation where people have made mistakes. Some people have genuinely had people out to get them. Hanlon’s Razor offers a way to be both kinder to ourselves and to others by suggesting that the chance of an action being genuinely mean is far less likely than it being an accident.
When things go wrong, it’s very easy to believe that people are deliberately getting in your way. You find yourself telling yourself little stories. They deliberately didn’t do the washing up so you have to do it. They made sure they didn’t get the thing from the shop you asked them to get, just to spite you. Once you start down this path, it’s easy to get tunnel vision. You begin to remember the little things in the past that got on your nerves. And if you’re not careful, it’s easy to build a whole conspiracy around things which are almost always mistakes and human error.
Hanlon’s Razor is a heuristic (or guiding principle) that helps us to navigate the world more kindly. It goes something like this:
“One should not attribute to malice what can be more easily explained by stupidity”
The idea behind Hanlon’s Razor is that it’s actually quite hard to act maliciously and achieve a particular goal against one particular individual.
An evil plot usually requires a lot of moving parts. This takes a lot of energy first of all, which is often difficult to fit in among all of life’s mundanities and pleasures. It also makes a conspiracy inherently difficult to manage.
So truly plot against someone requires the bad actor to spend an awful lot of time with you as the centre of their world. As most of us know from personal experience, the person we spend most of the time thinking about it ourselves. To dwell on another person to the point of plotting their downfall would be quite a feat of focus.
In most instances, people are people. They’re doing life, making mistakes, and trying to manage as best they can.
When you’re walking somewhere fast and you’ve got someone walking slowly in front of you, it’s easy to seethe and think they’re the most ignorant person in the world.
Another example – English people take queuing very seriously (and rightly so) – when someone cuts in the queue, it’s easy to feel personally violated. Common practice is to sigh an entire lungful of sigh, as irritated-ly as you can, before making an under-the-breath, comment about how unbelievable it is, and how dare they.
Hanlon’s razor suggests that we take a step back. It’s more likely that the person you’re stuck behind on your walk simply doesn’t know you’re there. It’s even more likely they don’t know that you’re trying to get somewhere quickly. Your partner or flatmate who didn’t do the washing up probably didn’t know it would upset you. They could be having trouble at work which is making them distracted. They might just not think about washing up as much as you do.
By ascribing ignorance to these things, rather than malice, Hanlon’s Razor opens up an opportunity for us to discuss how we feel and focus on the actual problem (dirty dishes) rather than the imagined one (a wider-reaching conspiracy to make your life worse).
Hanlon’s Razor also helps us in a wider context. There is a lot of profit to be made in the world at the moment by channeling outrage and casting intent. Mainstream media and social media are by far the best examples of this as they remove nuance from stories and context from individuals in order to create an easy, good-versus-evil narrative. They capitalise on creating daemons from situations that could be mostly explained by error. Hanlon’s razor is a great guide to help move against this influence and approach the world more rationally.
By considering first that people have most likely a mistake, treating them with generosity and communication first, life becomes a kinder, more tolerant and less paranoid place.
There is one exception – people who cut queues are in fact evil.
This is a rearrangement of a “mental model” from Farnam Street. Their website provides brilliant, high signal articles about lots of different things. Their philosophy is to try and provide people with the lessons that others have already learned so that they don’t have to spend as much time learning those lessons themselves.
Their website is available and recommended here: https://fs.blog/blog/
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