Recently I've been deep-diving into a model of brain, mind, and behavior—active inference and the free energy principle—developed by a leading neuroscientist and computational psychiatrist Karl Friston.1 Through these investigations, I had the pleasure of meeting Alexey Tolchinsky, a clinical psychologist and researcher who originally studied physics in his undergraduate program and later on pursued a doctorate in clinical psychology. He is one of the authors investigating the clinical practice in psychology and psychiatry using the framework of dynamical systems, including Chaos Theory. He currently is working on papers exploring depersonalization and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

In this interview, we focus on "narrative fallacy," which helps explain a common way people create misleading inferences by filling in the blanks in the data too quickly. Stated differently, narrative fallacy happens when people prematurely create a coherent story from disconnected bits and pieces of information. This is one of the ways we often get ourselves into avoidable trouble, going beyond "jumping to conclusions" to become a way of approaching the world. Conversely, finding ways to mitigate the effects of narrative fallacies may lead to more accurate and adaptive inferences, and, in turn, to better clinical outcomes, and more generally to think through key decisions with greater clarity.

GHB: What is narrative fallacy?

AT: Narrative fallacy is connecting the details or events into a coherent story form while we do not know if these details are connected. Often, we come up with a causal story. For example, let us imagine that John’s common cold symptoms disappeared one week after they started, and he has been washing his hands every day. If he ends up thinking that his handwashing cured the common cold, that would be an example of a narrative fallacy. The relationship inferred between A and B in a narrative........

© Psychology Today