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Unintended consequences are outcomes that are not (or not limited to) what the actor intended in a particular situation. The unintended results may be foreseen or unforeseen, but they should be the logical or likely results of the action. For example, students of history often conjecture that if the Treaty of Versailles had not imposed such harsh conditions on Germany, World War II would not have occurred. From this perspective, one might consider the war an unintended consequence of the treaty.

One may class unintended consequences into roughly three types:

• a positive unexpected benefit, usually referred to as serendipity or a windfall
• a potential source of problems, according to Murphy's Law
• a negative or a perverse effect, which may be the opposite result of what is intended

Discussions of unintended consequences usually refer to the third situation of perverse results. This situation often arises because a policy has a perverse incentive and causes actions contrary to what is desired.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

The Law of Unintended Consequences states that any action will produce some unintended consequences.

A classic example is a bypass – a road built to relieve traffic congestion on a congested road – that attracts new development and with it more traffic, resulting in two congested streets instead of one.

This maxim is not a scientific law; it is more in line with Murphy's law as a warning against the belief that we can control the world around us. In other words, each cause has more than one effect, which will invariably include at least one side effect. The side effect can potentially be more significant than any of the intended effects.

History

The idea dates to the Scottish Enlightenment and consequentialism, or judging by results. In the twentieth century, sociologist Robert K. Merton once again popularized the concept, sometimes referred to as the Law of Unforeseen Consequences. Merton (1936) spoke of the "unanticipated consequences" of "purposive social action", emphasizing that his term "purposive action… [is exclusively] concerned with 'conduct' as distinct from 'behavior.' That is, with action that involves motives and consequently a choice between various alternatives" (p.895).

Causes

Possible causes of unintended consequences include the world's inherent complexity (parts of a system responding to changes in the environment), perverse incentives, human stupidity, self-deception or other cognitive or emotional biases.

Robert K. Merton listed five causes of unanticipated consequences:^[1]

1. Ignorance (It is impossible to anticipate everything, thereby leading to incomplete analysis)
2. Error (Incorrect analysis of the problem or following habits that worked in the past but may not apply to the current situation)
3. Immediate interest, which may override long-term interests
4. Basic values may require or prohibit certain actions even if the long-term result might be unfavorable (these long-term consequences may eventually cause changes in basic values)
5. Self-defeating prophecy (Fear of some consequence drives people to find solutions before the problem occurs, thus the non-occurrence of the problem is unanticipated)

Merton is also said to have stated that "no blanket statement categorically affirming or denying the practical feasibility of all social planning is warranted."

Examples

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Examples of unexpected benefits:

• The medieval policy of setting up large hunting reserves for the nobility has preserved green space, often as parks, throughout England and other places in Europe. Likewise the creation of "no-man's lands" in places such as the Korean Demilitarized Zone have created unique natural habitats.

• The sinking of ships in shallow waters during wartime has created many artificial coral reefs.

• Controversial research carried out by John J. Donohue and Steven Levitt and published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics suggests that legalized abortion in the United States can account for about 50% of the drop in national crime rates that occurred in the 1990s. As evidence, Donohue and Levitt cite the fact that states that legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade saw correspondingly earlier drops in crime, and states where abortion is common saw greater drops in crime than states where abortion is rare. Most convincingly, they found that "in high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states."

• In medicine, most drugs have unintended consequences associated with their use, which are known as 'side effects'. Many are harmful and are more precisely called 'adverse effects'. However, some are beneficial—for instance, aspirin, a pain reliever, can also thin the blood and help to prevent heart attacks. The existence of beneficial side effects also leads to off label use—prescription or use of a drug for a non-intended purpose.

Examples of perverse results:

• The Streisand Effect occurs when an attempt to censor or remove a certain piece of information (such as photograph, file or website) instead causes the information in question to become widely known and distributed in a very short time. The fact that a piece of information is being restricted assigns to it a previously nonexistent value in the eyes of the public.

• The introduction of rabbits into Australia for sport led to an explosive growth in the rabbit population; rabbits have become a major feral pest in Australia.

• Standard economic theory implies that minimum wage laws increase unemployment among low wage workers (the workers whose wages the minimum wage law will affect). A survey of American Economic Association economists found that 45.6% fully agreed with the statement "a minimum wage increases unemployment among young and unskilled workers", 27.9% partially agreed, and 26.5% disagreed.^[2]

• The stiffening of penalties for driving while intoxicated in the United States in the 1980s led, at first, to an increase in hit and run accidents, most of which were believed to have been drunken drivers trying to escape the law (Later, legislators stiffened penalties for leaving the scene of an accident when driving while intoxicated as well).

• In 1990, driven by concern for the increasing number of cyclists' head injuries, the State of Victoria (Australia) made safety helmets mandatory for all bicycle riders. The expected significant reduction in the absolute number of head injuries occurred, but there was also a concomitant, entirely unexpected reduction in the number of juvenile cyclists. Research by Vulcan et al. found that the reduction in the number of juvenile cyclists was entirely because the youths considered wearing a bicycle helmet unfashionable.^{citation needed}

• "Prohibition", in the 1920s U.S., originally enacted to suppress the alcohol trade, drove many small-time alcohol suppliers out of business and consolidated the hold of large-scale organized crime over the illegal alcohol industry. By the time the U.S. repealed Prohibition, the brewing industry had concentrated in a few major brewers, which had been able to ride it out. Sixty years later, the "War on Drugs," intended to suppress the illegal drug trade, likewise drove many small-time drug dealers out of business and consolidated the hold of organized drug cartels over the illegal drug industry. Additionally, it has led to the existence of street drugs of unknown strength and contamination; at least some drug-related (and particularly opiate-related) deaths are the result of accidental overdosing on drugs that a dealer neglected to dilute to the usual extent.

• In CIA jargon, "blowback" describes the unintended, even undesirable consequences of covert operations. Examples include:
  • Operation Ajax, which contributed to the 1979 Iranian Revolution & the Iran hostage crisis
  • Covert funding of the Contras in Nicaragua, which lead to the Iran-Contra Affair
  • Covert funding of the Mujahideen, which led to the rise of the Taliban

• Government rent control has led to the unintended consequence of housing shortages and reduction in housing quality, increased difficulty for less desirable renters to obtain or retain housing and even to the creation of slums—areas where owners permit rental property to run down until it becomes uninhabitable, leading renters to leave.

• Father Matthew's temperance campaign in 19th-century Ireland – in which thousands of people vowed never to drink alcohol again – led to increased consumption of ether (a much more dangerous intoxicant) by those unwilling to break their "pledge".

Failure mode and effects analysis

Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is a fault tree method (first developed for systems engineering) that examines potential failures in products or processes. It may be used to evaluate risk management priorities for mitigating known threat-vulnerabilities.

FMEA helps select remedial actions that reduce cumulative impacts of life-cycle consequences (risks) from a systems failure (fault).^[3]

Purposeful gaming to achieve unintended consequences

Another more restrictive use of the concept of unintended consequence is that it occurs when a mechanism that has been installed in the world with the intention of producing one result is used to produce a different (and often conflicting) result. "Gaming the system" illustrates this type of unintended consequence. One "games a system" (for example, the tax code) when one acts in such a way that one gains tax advantages by exploiting a tax rule that its drafters intended for some other purpose. Similarly, computer viruses, worms, and other such plagues are unintended consequences of the way certain computer systems are designed. Spam is an unintended consequence of the way the email system works. The preceding computer examples illustrate this sense of unintended consequence in that spammers hijack a mechanism, e.g., email, intended for interpersonal communication, for advertising.

This sense of unintended consequence excludes, for example, the proliferation of rabbits in Australia as an unintended consequence of their introduction. The proliferation of rabbits was indeed an unexpected (and unintended) consequence of their introduction, but it didn't result from the exploitation of a mechanism for some other purpose. It was just a consequence of a historical event. Many historical events have such unexpected (and unintended) consequences, but are not considered to exemplify this use of the term. The intent to "game the system" distinguishes this interpretation of unintended consequence from such a broader interpretation of unintended consequence as a result of simple historical contingency. See the Museum of Unintended Consequences for more examples.

Solution or mitigating actions

The concepts of interlock research and Information Routing Group were proposed to overcome the effects of this Law by ensuring that a spontaneously forming network of experts would feedback to the initiators of any proposed action or policy those consequences that the experts could foresee.

An associated concept was that of the Relevance Paradox, where an actor would seek out information that was obviously relevant, but that they did not see as relevant although it might well be.

See also

• Conflict of interest
• Counter-intuitive
• Externality
• Futures techniques
• Herostratus
• Hutber's law
• Invasive species
• Kludge
• Moral hazard
• Nocebo
• Parable of the broken window
• Perverse effects of vaccination
• Placebo
• Regression testing

References

External links

• The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action by Robert K. Merton, American Sociological Review, Vol 1 Issue 6, Dec 1936, pp.894-904
• Atlantic magazine article: "Blowback"
• Observer article: Why 'blowback' is the hidden danger of war
• MSNBC article on Bin Laden and blowback
• Unintended Consequences
• Museum of Unintended Consequences
• Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, Vantage Books, 1997.
• Tomislav V. Kovandzic, John Sloan III, and Lynne M. Vieraitis. Unintended Consequences of Politically Popular Sentencing Policy: The Homicide-Promoting Effects of 'Three Strikes' in U.S. Cities (1980-1999). Criminology & Public Policy, Vol 1, Issue 3, July 2002.
• Vulcan, A.P., Cameron, M.H. & Heiman, L., "Evaluation of mandatory bicycle helmet use in Victoria, Australia", 36th Annual Conference Proceedings, Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine, Oct 5-7, 1992.
• Vulcan, A.P., Cameron, M.H. & Watson, W.L., "Mandatory Bicycle Helmet Use: Experience in Victoria, Australia", World Journal of Surgery, Vol.16, No.3, (May/June 1992), pp.389-397.
• Knock-on effect