The Illusion of Understanding

Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. Good stories provide a simple and coherent account of people's actions and intentions. You are always ready to interpret behavior as a manifestation of general propensities and personality traits, causes that you can readily match to effects. The halo effect discussed earlier contributes to coherence because it inclines us to match our view of all the qualities of a person to our judgment of one attribute that is particularly significant. If we think a baseball pitcher is handsome and athletic, for example, we're likely to rate him better at throwing the ball, too.