Give Me a Reason

Everyone who has raised a child has gone through the “Why?” stage. Humans are wired to figure things out, and asking why is often the most direct route to understanding.

In his book Why? Charles Tilly outlines a framework for how this question is answered. There are four approaches: Conventions, stories, codes, and technical accounts.

1) Conventions are standard explanations of an event which don’t attempt to establish causality (e.g., you explain to a friend you have not responded to an email because you are swamped at work). You and your friend both know this is not literally the reason (after all, you’re not at work 24 hours a day), but your friend accepts the convention and does not make you account for every minute since you received the email.

2) Stories are more detailed narratives which provide more details and present a simplified causality model. If you are a 20 minutes late to work, a conventional comment about traffic being bad will probably suffice. If you keep your spouse waiting 20 minutes in a restaurant for an anniversary dinner, you will probably have a very detailed story establishing you left with plenty of time, the nature of the accident causing the traffic delay, etc.

3) Codes explain actions by referring to existing rules. For example, an employee is not reimbursed for five 40 mile business related trips but is reimbursed for one 60 mile trip because the policy is no reimbursements for trips less than 50 miles.

4) Technical Accounts are detailed explanations of events which attempt to prove causality (or at correlation) with evidence. An example is an engineering study explaining the failure of a dam.

Here is how the rejection of a loan might be explained:

• The borrower had bad credit (convention)
• I approved a loan to someone who had multiple late credit cards just like this applicant and the prior loan defaulted…(story)
• The investor will not buy the loan if the borrower’s FICO score is below 600 (code)
• Studies have shown that borrowers with FICO scores below 600 default 40% more frequently…(technical account).

Each approach has drawbacks. Conventions are by definition incomplete and don’t fully establish causality or educate. They’re fine as a kind of shorthand when nobody really cares much about the answer, but are usually inappropriate when someone really wants to know why.

Similarly, codes are a shorthand explanation which don’t educate (except about the code itself) or explain. Saying an investor won’t buy a loan if the FICO score is below 600 doesn’t explain why that’s the investor’s policy any more than “Because I said so!” explains to a child why they have to go to bed at 9:00 PM. Codes work best when everyone understands the reasons underlying the code already.

Stories are extremely effective at conveying values and information. Like asking “Why?”, narrative explanation and understanding seem to be hard wired into humans (picture cave dwellers huddled around the fire listening to stories of the day’s hunt). However, if you’re using a story to convey a truth, you need to make sure your story represents a truth, and not an isolated instance. For example, your story about how dangerous unleashed dogs are because you were once bitten by one will not resonate with someone who spends a lot of time around unleashed dogs at a dog park. Also. stories are seductive, and as discussed in in a previous post people are all too willing to accept them uncritically.

Technical accounts use evidence and establish causality to answer the question. They are the nuclear weapons of explanation – after a good technical account you really know why. The problem with technical accounts is they tend to be boring, and more information than the audience is looking for. They also tend to be limited in scope – it’s hard to establish the why of big events conclusively.

Given each has drawbacks, which is the best form to use? They can each be appropriate in certain contexts. Tilly introduces the concept of “superior stories”; stories which draw on the strengths of a narrative format, but which are underpinned with the evidence and causal links found in a technical account.