This post is the result of me comparing different definitions of unintended consequences from varied authors and researchers.
At first, I found what I expected. The credit for the popularization of ‘unintended consequences’ is given to American sociologist Robert K. Merton, whose initial published work (1936) on the topic was titled, “the unanticipated consequences of purposive social action.”1You may notice, as I did, that this title uses the term ‘unanticipated’ opposed to ‘unintended.’ You may additionally, like me, briefly acknowledge the difference and then decide that those are essentially the same thing and conclude the nuance is meaningless.
That’s what I thought until I stumbled across Frank de Zwart’s (2015), “unintended but not unanticipated consequences.”2 In this piece, De Zwart explains how the two concepts became conflated into the near exclusive usage of ‘unintended consequences’ (with charts from Google Ngram to demonstrate), and how unanticipated takes the backseat as a simple synonym. The key difference is that it is fully possible, and true in many cases, that the problematic ‘unintended’ outcomes were anticipated by designers or decision makers. The first example provided in the above journal article refers to possible, known side effects from medications — unintended to cause death, for example, but a known outcome for a small number of cases.
De Zwart provides additional examples of things that generally fall under unintended consequences in public consciousness, but are really both ‘unintended but anticipated.’ One of these is China’s previous one-child policy. Along with the intended outcome (curbing population growth), there was the unintended outcome (abandoning and killing female infants, leading to a deficit of females to males. De Zwart provides citations indicating that policy makers and government officials anticipated this outcome. These included forbidding scholars and the public from talking about probable action resulting from known gender preferences, and an initiative to train people in rural areas about gender equality in order to refute the cultural idea that daughters were inferior to sons.
My analysis of this is similar to De Zwart’s, but I suspect he, in an attempt to be more cordial to possible readers, kept his conclusion tame. He notes that people tend to believe that drastic negative consequences are unintended and unanticipated because ‘if they knew this was a possibility, surely they would have not done X or would have informed the public of this possible outcome.’ But when these decisions are examined more closely, it becomes apparent that that is not the case. Other authors and experts quoted in this journal article indicate that decision makers do often know about these possibilities, but have to make difficult decisions with limited resources. The article ends with a brief conclusion describing multiple, plausible reasons for why the decision makers made whichever choice; these include ‘the lesser of two evils’, ‘indifferent to future harm’, and ‘willing to gamble.’
I, however, would like to state that my primary concern learning this circles around the most insidious of these choices, that if some negative outcomes were anticipated but decision makers were ‘indifferent to future harm’, particularly for people of certain financial and social backgrounds, of specific skin colors, or other heavily discriminatory measures.
Based on this information, I will attempt to assess and mark whether I believe the future unintended consequence posts were anticipated or unanticipated.