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. [↩]

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.

1. Merton, R. (1936). The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action. Published in American Sociological Review. [↩]
2. De Zwart, F. (2015). Unintended but not Unanticipated Consequences. Published in the journal of Theory and Society. [↩]