The Illusion of Control and the Failure of Social Interventions

A 10-year randomized controlled trial of 531 rural schools in Peru found that providing laptops to children had zero effect on academic performance, despite the widespread belief that technology access was a primary driver of educational success. This result highlights a broader trend where social interventions often fail to achieve their stated goals because of a lack of rigorous evaluation and a psychological 'illusion of control.'

The Failure of Well-Intentioned Interventions

A variety of social policies and philanthropic programs have failed to achieve their stated goals, often despite significant funding. For example, $3 billion in 'School Improvement Grants' for the worst-performing schools in the U.S. yielded no measurable improvement, and a $280 million effort to help Afghan women find jobs left the government unable to confirm if any women actually secured employment.

Similarly, initiatives aimed at diversity or specific social behaviors have often stalled. Universities that hired Chief Diversity Officers between 2001 and 2019 did not see an increase in diverse students or faculty. In some cases, messaging intended to encourage vaccination accidentally increased the belief that vaccines cause autism.

“The point of this ritual is not to signal our obeisance to the gods (although if any of them want to stop by and help us out, that would be cool), but to remind ourselves that we know nothing.”

— We need more goat sacrifices

The Iron Law of Evaluation

Sociologist Peter Rossi famously proposed the 'Iron Law of Evaluation,' which suggests that the net expected impact of a large social program is zero. This is compounded by the 'Brass Law,' which posits that the more a program is intended to change people, the more likely its actual impact will be zero.

While some programs do succeed, they are difficult to identify because one-off studies are easily manipulated to produce positive results. This creates a landscape where many interventions are left-coded failures—meaning they failed to meet their primary objectives—while others are right-coded failures, where the intervention produced a result that was the opposite of what was intended.

The Psychology of Intentionality

The reason these failures persist may be rooted in the 'Illusion of Control,' a psychological phenomenon where individuals believe their actions have a greater influence over outcomes than they actually do. This is evidenced by the fact that people often value lottery tickets more when they choose the numbers themselves, even though the odds of winning remain identical.

In the context of social policy, this illusion leads to a lack of rigorous experimental evaluation. A study of National Science Foundation-funded STEM projects found that 76% of researchers do not attempt to evaluate their programs with actual experiments, operating on the assumption that a 'bright idea' is sufficient to guarantee success.

Case Study: The NYU Medical School Donation

A concrete example of this failure is a $100 million donation by billionaire Kenneth Langone to eliminate tuition at NYU’s medical school. The goal was to encourage students to choose lower-paying specialties like pediatrics, but the student body makeup remained unchanged.

The intervention failed because the math of medical school debt did not justify a shift in career choice. With an average medical school debt of $200,000 and a family practitioner earning roughly $281,000 annually, the debt was already manageable. Because the tuition was waived for everyone regardless of income, there was no economic incentive for students to choose lower-paying specialties over high-earning ones like orthopedic surgery.

Chart drawn by HN Digest from figures reported by experimental-history.com; values are shown as written in the source.