When looking into unintended consequences, I have found that most researchers focus purely on the outcomes of large-scale actions, such as policies, that have explicit, pre-determined outcomes. This makes sense to me from an analytical standpoint to understand the impact of large scale decisions, but I find that unintended consequences permeate life in more personal, unconscious ways as well.

My goal in creating and describing this model is to help myself create a structural mindset I can use to analyze future cases that I encounter.

My Model

Following is my theoretical model of the factors to consider in analyzing unintended consequences, in no particular order yet. This is a work in progress and I may make updates or changes, in this or newer posts.

• Intentionality
• Planning
• Scope
• Outcomes

Intentionality

Intentionality examines whether the action was made with a specific outcome as the goal. Sometimes people have a subconscious intentionality that they may only be peripherally aware of, so I would consider three primary categories here: intentional, semi-intentional (this might be more reactive, will ponder), and unintentional.

An intentional act may be ‘asking someone to do the dishes’ or ‘doing the dishes’, there is a goal in mind (clean dishes), and methods you are using to reach that goal.

A semi-intentional act may be ‘responding to someone yelling at you’, you may have to make a split second decision based on previous experiences and will have less, if any, time for planning your reaction. The goal may be to ‘protect yourself’ or ‘calm the situation down’ depending on your relationship to the person, your experiences, etc. But even with that goal in mind, the automatic response might be to yell back, to push them, to run, etc. It’s possible that in emergency situations, the goal becomes more important than how you get there, and the effectiveness of the action may not be able to be analyzed in a short period of time.

An unintentional action might be ‘using “how are you?” as a greeting,’ this is a common usage, but getting an actual response from anyone on how they genuinely are doing is unexpected and not the purpose of the question-turned-statement.

Planning

If the action was intentional, what level of planning went into it? Were the consequences anticipated, but the instigator was unable or unwilling to plan for them? Or was it something that couldn’t be anticipated for some reason?¹

Scope

This refers to the impact level of the action, targets may range from individuals to large groups. Does it affect a geological area, an ethnic group, a specific neighbor, a single coworker?

Outcomes

There are a wide variety of possible outcomes, and multiple outcomes can of course occur. Things to consider are short term outcomes vs long term, positive/negative, intentional/unintentional, anticipated/unanticipated, etc. My previous post on the cobra effect is one type of outcome, often known as a ‘perverse’ consequence because the result becomes worse than the original issue.

1. Some reasons are defined in the early works of American sociologist Robert K. Merton, I will go over these in a separate post. [↩]