Universal Principles of Design, Updated and Expanded Third Edition

023 Causal Reductionism

A tendency to fixate on one cause when solving problems, ignoring the reality of multiple causes.

No real-world effect or phenomenon results from a single cause. Products don’t succeed or fail due to a single feature or marketing campaign. Components don’t fail due to a single defect or environmental condition. Accidents don’t occur due to a single event or human error. Even the common framing of “root cause” incorrectly suggests the existence of single cause-effect phenomena, when effects are always the result of “root causes”— plural. That people commonly think otherwise demonstrates the pervasiveness of causal reductionism.1

Causal reduction occurs when multiple salient causes are improperly simplified to one cause ...