بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

Cognitive Biases & Historiography

The HCM presupposes an overly rationalist and linear model of historical development, failing to take into account behavioral economics and decision theory. Specifically, HCM scholars fail to consider cognitive biases, uncertainty, and the limits of human rationality (as explored by Nassim Taleb, Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and others). Assuming that religious beliefs and texts emerge primarily from deliberate socio-political construction or material conditions ignores the role of randomness, heuristics, and cognitive biases in shaping human perception and historical memory. Furthermore, HCM analyses of history are replete with mistakes owing due to cognitive biases and faulty heuristics.

Kahneman and Tversky’s foundational groundbreaking work on cognitive biases (such as the availability heuristic, hindsight bias, and substitution effects) suggests that human decision-making is often irrational, context-dependent, and shaped by intuitive leaps rather than purely logical reasoning. This drastically reshapes interpretations of history. The problem with heuristics and biases is further compounded when we consider that we must account for them at the documentation and interpretative layers as well. Therefore, cognitive biases and heuristics are present both in the original data (the historical actor), at the level of data compilation (the original documentation), and at the level of the interpreting researcher.

The problem is cubed, problematizing the kind of empirical naturalistic research that HCM scholars engage in. The HCM tends to view religious texts as rationally engineered products of their historical contexts. Such an assumption fails to consider the irrationality behind historical documents. Additionally, the oldest sources source materials available to us are often produced second-hand, meaning that the irrationality and cognitive biases of the documenter must also be accounted for if objectivity is desired. Additionally, HCM academics routinely fail to consider their own irrationality when engaging in “plausible” interpretations.

These fallacies are not conscious attempts on the part of scholars to distort history or facts. They are unconscious biases that occur the part of researchers whom almost always believe themselves to be as impartial and unbiased as possible. Their goodwill actually makes the distorted outcomes of their research more pernicious, as students and the public are convinced of their sincerity in the quest for objective facts. However their regular exhibition of these bias compromises a great deal of their work.

It should be noted that a faith-informed historiography, while still subject to some of these same criticisms, may point to the belief that God has guaranteed an accurate account of the specific historical events which occurred prior to more abundant historical documentation. Critically, the idea of Divine preservation guarantees that enough historical documentation is reliable and has been interpretated at a sufficiently reliable level till the present day. There is no such guarantee with empirical research, indicating that any meaningful analysis within a naturalist framework may be genuinely impossible.

By failing to engage with these cognitive limitations, HCM overestimates its ability to reconstruct historical realities and underestimates the role of uncertainty, randomness, and deeply ingrained mental heuristics in the transmission and interpretation of religious traditions.

The Availability Heuristic

The subsequent analysis of cognitive heuristics and biases in secular historiography will be far from exhaustive. This is an area that is poorly studied. However, we will highlight four of the most prescient and immediately “available” biases that readers can utilize in critically analyzing works by HCM scholars. The first of which is the availability heuristic. Mukharij, Aroop, and Zeckhauser write,

“The foundational work of behavioral psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman shows that individuals tend to give excess weight to the explanatory value of more easily imaginable or more easily recalled instances and experiences. For instance, if individuals have friends who have suffered some medical ailment, they might think their chances of suffering the same fate are far greater than proper Bayesian updating would imply. This is the availability heuristic: what more easily comes to mind overly inflates an individual’s calculations of likelihood.

“Explanation bias is in some ways the fruit of the availability heuristic. Specifically, the availability heuristic may help to explain why the explanation bias exists: the more easily a plausible explanation of an historical happening springs to a person’s mind, the greater the probability that individual will tend to believe that it actually caused the outcome. That may be particularly the case for the poorly informed, who are then less likely to consider competing explanations for historical events.”[[i]](#_edn1)

Hindsight Bias

The second bias to consider is the “Hindsight Bias.” The Hindsight Bias describes a tendency to interpret historical events according to subsequent, not preceding, events. Naturalistic historiographers may attribute intent or causality, prior effects, to historical events based on subsequent consequences – despite there being no justification for doing so. Historical conclusions about manuscripts, influences, effects, intents, must occur based on evidence prior to an event, not based on information that is only known in hindsight. Essentially, accurate historiography would consider only the past relative to the datum being analyzed, not all the history subsequently. Mukharij, Aroop, and Zeckhauser write,

“Hindsight bias refers to the tendency by individuals to exaggerate, in hindsight, what they could have predicted in foresight. In other words, after a past event, individuals tend to believe they were more certain about the outcome that happened than they actually were, a phenomenon that Baruch Fischhoff labelled “creeping determinism.” … That is because, in hindsight, people have a hard time recalling how much they did not know at the time (i.e. their past uncertainty), and their knowledge of the outcome influences their memories.

“While hindsight bias refers to an inflated confidence that one had foreseen a past outcome ex ante, explanation bias refers to an inflated confidence in a particular explanation for a past outcome ex post.” [[ii]](#_edn2)

An example of this is in intertextual parallel analysis. If an HCM scholar draws a parallel between a particular Qur’anic pericope and another older text, they are certainly unable to determine causality. However, it may seem “most plausible” in hindsight that the Qur’an was influenced by the other text. This is because, given the benefit of having the two texts and adherents of both faiths interact over centuries, the same kind of intellectual cross-fertilization seems likely. This does not account for convergent evolution of disparate texts, random similarities, or even similarities projected by the researcher onto the texts. In fact, since there is no way to objectively quantify such similarities, the entire analysis is based on plausibility and highly susceptible to the Hindsight bias effect.

Claims about manuscripts, sources, influence, audience, or authorial intention must be grounded in evidence available prior to or contemporaneous with the event being analyzed, not in patterns that become intelligible only after centuries of subsequent history. Mukharij, Aroop, and Zeckhauser write,

“Yet, once events have occurred, people armed with the knowledge of hindsight tend to exaggerate those events' predictability and inevitability. To be sure, with the passage of time, documents, research, and perhaps interviews with participants may enable a better understanding of past happenings. Nevertheless, it is inconsistent to view the future as being uncertain but the past as having been predictable.”[[iii]](#_edn3)

This problem is especially acute in analyses of intertextual parallels. When a historical-critical scholar observes a parallel between a Qurʾānic passage and an earlier or contemporaneous text, the existence and perceived similarities of the non-Qur’anic text alone does not establish dependence, borrowing, or causal influence. Yet from the vantage point of later history, where Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others interacted over centuries, it can appear “plausible” that the Qurʾān absorbed material from surrounding traditions. That plausibility, however, is often an artifact of hindsight. It assumes a later picture of textual interaction and projects it backward onto the Qurʾān’s original milieu without evidence.

The methodological problem is that HCM scholars may admit several competing explanations: direct influence, indirect transmission, shared oral traditions, common Near Eastern motifs, convergent formulation, coincidence, or even resemblance produced by the scholar’s interpretive framing. Unless the researcher can establish a historically credible transmission pathway, chronological proximity, linguistic mediation, and contextual reason for dependence; the claim of influence remains entirely speculative. Yet, HCM scholars do not represent their analyses as mere informed speculation without evidentiary basis.

The mere subjective resemblance that two texts may bear to one another does not determine the direction, mechanism, or reality of causation. The concept of ergodicity, that long sample paths end up resembling each other, average of many short samples tends to equal a long sample, further calls into question HCM analyses. Since we observe history from the vantage point of the future, and cannot isolate any particular historical developments, we may attribute causality between data sets that has no evidentiary basis – which may simply be a product of ergodicity or convergent evolution between similar religious thinkers. Quite simply: much of the analysis performed by HCM scholars is subject to Hindsight Bias and there is currently no way in the method to distinguish genuine conclusions from statistical noise in history.

The Narrative fallacy

The “Narrative Fallacy” or “Explanation Bias” warns against retroactively imposing overly coherent, deterministic explanations on complex historical phenomena; a flaw frequently seen in HCM analyses across original sources. This fallacy leads historiographers to imply greater certainty to causal explanations of past events than is present in the evidence. In doing so, they conflate plausibility with probability. Mukharij, Aroop, and Zeckhauser write,

“Rather, we are observing that uncertainty and ignorance almost always receive too little attention when history is told (by anyone), leading to overconfidence in causal explanations of past events.”[[iv]](#_edn4)

“Partly in consequence, people often overvalue their preferred explanations regarding the past, that is, their causal claims for historical events.”[[v]](#_edn5)

“Had such events happened, history would have been written far differently, with a greater emphasis on other underlying forces that, perhaps counterintuitively, were also present in the reality of the past.

“Social and political movements also challenge confident causal claims. Their progress is highly uncertain. Consider the past decade's unexpectedly rapid acceptance of same-sex marriage, the continued vehemence of the abortion debate, and the worldwide rise of populism. Parsimonious explanations for outcomes that were once highly uncertain should be greeted with skepticism.”[[vi]](#_edn6)

“When an explanation is offered for an outcome, the significant uncertainties that prevailed are often ignored or forgotten. To some extent, this is reasonable. Through an outcome, one can know the actual circumstances–what “won out”; furthermore, information comes out after an event that was not known previously.”[[vii]](#_edn7)

The narrative fallacy is demonstrated when historiographers attempt to determine clear causality based on documented events, while contemporaneous future forecasting of those same events would have been riddled with uncertainty. This can lead to inflating the importance of historical events, ignoring the actual causes of events, asserting knowledge where there is none, distorting the nature of historical events under scrutiny, and distorting the nature of history itself.

Uniformitarianism & the Principle of Analogy

Following from the hard and social sciences, HCM academics rely on the principle of uniformitarianism with respect to the behavior and development of historical individuals and movements. According to Dr. Bruce L. Gordon,

"The uniformitarian principle assumes that the behavior of nature is regular and indicative of an objective causal structure in which presently operative causes may be projected into the past to explain the historical development of the physical world and projected into the future for the purposes of prediction and control. In short, it involves the process of inferring past causes from presently observable effects under the assumption that the fundamental causal regularities of the world have not changed over time."

In Defense of Uniformitarianism, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, pg. 82 https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2013/PSCF6-13Gordon.pdf

While uniformitarianism may seem like a reasonable assumption as pertains to physics or geology, uniformitarianism in the realm of social sciences or psychology is far more problematic. Assuming that people in the past behaved or had the same capabilities as people today, without direct evidence to indicate so, is problematic. The problem of uniformitarianism in psychology, sociology, or the other social sciences underpinning historical analysis is compounded as our understanding of human behavior is far from exact. Many essential scientific studies have endemic reproducibility issues and social sciences are some of the worst in that regard. Therefore, we have little meaningful empirical baseline by which we can extrapolate human behavior to assert some kind of uniformitarian analogy.

[[i]](#_ednref1) Mukharji, Aroop, and Richard Zeckhauser. "Bound to Happen: Explanation Bias in Historical Analysis." Faculty Research Working Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School, Oct. 2019, updated Nov. 2019, RWP19-032. Working paper

[[ii]](#_ednref2) Mukharji, Aroop, and Richard Zeckhauser. "Bound to Happen: Explanation Bias in Historical Analysis." Faculty Research Working Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School, Oct. 2019, updated Nov. 2019, RWP19-032. Working paper

[[iii]](#_ednref3) Mukharji, Aroop, and Richard Zeckhauser. "Bound to Happen: Explanation Bias in Historical Analysis." Faculty Research Working Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School, Oct. 2019, updated Nov. 2019, RWP19-032. Working paper

[[iv]](#_ednref4) Ibid

[[v]](#_ednref5) Mukharji, Aroop, and Richard Zeckhauser. "Bound to Happen: Explanation Bias in Historical Analysis." Faculty Research Working Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School, Oct. 2019, updated Nov. 2019, RWP19-032. Working paper

[[vi]](#_ednref6) Mukharji, Aroop, and Richard Zeckhauser. "Bound to Happen: Explanation Bias in Historical Analysis." Faculty Research Working Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School, Oct. 2019, updated Nov. 2019, RWP19-032. Working paper

[[vii]](#_ednref7) Mukharji, Aroop, and Richard Zeckhauser. "Bound to Happen: Explanation Bias in Historical Analysis." Faculty Research Working Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School, Oct. 2019, updated Nov. 2019, RWP19-032. Working paper

By Ali Shukri Amin