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Applied broadly, this principle suggests that when assessing people’s actions, you should not assume that they acted out of a desire to cause harm if there is a reasonable alternative explanation.

“Never attribute to malice an action which is adequately explained by carelessness.”

For example, if you don’t receive a notice about an important event in your company, Hanlon’s razor means that you shouldn’t assume that this happened because the person in charge decided to avoid sending it to you since they dislike you, if it’s reasonable to assume that they simply forgot to send it.

Hanlon’s razor can be a beneficial principle to implement, in a variety of contexts.

Have a read of this article and see how you can use it yourself as an effective tool.

Hanlon’s razor is a concept used as a guiding principle. It helps you select the most likely — but not necessarily the correct — explanation for a situation. It is therefore a valuable reasoning tool, which can help you deal with various everyday issues, such as when someone fails to turn up for an appointment with you or does not respond to an email.

There are of course important caveats to consider when deploying Hanlon’s razor:

Hanlon’s razor doesn’t imply that actions never occur due to malice, but it suggests that you consider very carefully if it is reasonable to assume that negative outcomes occurred because of stupidity or similar causes, rather than malice.

Hanlon’s razor doesn’t consider if a specific action was justified or not.

Hanlon’s razor doesn’t suggest that a certain action is acceptable just because it happened because of stupidity instead of malice. Rather, Hanlon’s razor is used to focus your conscious thoughts on the most likely explanation for an action, after which you can decide how to judge that action and how to respond accordingly.

Overall, Hanlon’s razor is a rule of thumb for consciously evaluating and trying to understand people’s actions. This means that it’s not guaranteed to lead you to the right conclusion, but that it can nevertheless be a good starting point in many situations.

The benefits of Hanlon’s razor

There are two main benefits to using Hanlon’s razor:

Hanlon’s razor can help you find the right explanation for people’s actions. This is because, in many cases, we tend to assume that people acted out of malice, even though alternative explanations are much more likely.

Hanlon’s razor can help you avoid the negative emotions associated with assuming bad intentions. The assumption that someone acted out of malice will cause you to experience more negative emotions, such as anger or stress, compared to assuming that they acted due to other reasons.

Therefore, unless there is a good reason to assume that someone acted out of malice, it is often better to avoid assuming malice.

Using the Hanlon’s razor principle can help you consciously assess situations more quickly and easily. It can save you from having to dedicate more time, effort, and other emotional resources to assessing the situation.

It can also help you to doing the right thing from a moral perspective. Specifically, giving people the benefit of the doubt, not starting by assuming that they acted out of malice, helps others understand you choose to treat others the same way you would like to be treated yourself.

Using Hanlon’s razor can facilitate your relationships with others. Specifically, giving people the benefit of the doubt can help you communicate with them better, and can improve your relationships with them, both in the short-term and in the long-term. This is especially important when it comes to avoiding situations where you wrongly accuse others of acting out of malice, which can be detrimental to your relationship with them.

Hanlon’s razor may also prompt you to take action that you otherwise wouldn’t. For example, consider a situation where someone is doing something that bothers you, such as a situation where your colleague is talking very loudly on the phone in the office, disturbing all around them with the noise. Instinctively, you might start out by assuming that they are aware that what they’re doing is bothering everyone, and that they just don’t care, which can lead you to say nothing – but just fume. However, by implementing Hanlon’s razor, you might realise that they’re acting a certain way not because they don’t care, but because they are simply unaware of the issue they are causing. This realisation can prompt you to act, explaining the issue and asking them to move locations when making or taking their calls, which you wouldn’t take otherwise.

Overall, Hanlon’s razor offers numerous benefits, including helping you find the right explanation for people’s actions, helping you avoid the negative emotions associated with assuming bad intentions, improving your relationships with others, and prompting you to act.

How to implement Hanlon’s razor

Fortunately, implementing Hanlon’s razor is generally simple and easy, which is another thing that makes it such a useful principle. Essentially, you can implement Hanlon’s razor any time you’re trying to understand why someone undertook an action that you might attribute to bad intentions.

Simply take a breath - ask yourself “is a reasonable alternative explanation for that person’s behaviour”? If there is, you should generally assume that this alternative explanation is the right one, unless you have a compelling reason to assume that the person in question acted with bad intentions. The less likely it is, the more predisposed you should be to giving the other person the benefit of the doubt. This response can be described as “innocent until proven guilty.”

How likely it is that an action occurred due to malice (or other bad intentions). The more likely it is, the more guarded you might need to be. In such cases, it can be beneficial to start off by assuming malice, or other bad intentions, and to then accept an alternative explanation only if you have sufficient evidence. This can be described as “guilty until proven innocent.”

When trying to assess the likelihood, you can consider the other person’s past actions, as well as their general personality, their abilities, and what they stand to gain from acting maliciously.

What are the costs of incorrect assumptions.

What are the costs associated with incorrectly assuming bad intentions?

What are the costs of failing to recognise that the person is, indeed, acting out of malice?

Finally, note that in some cases, it can be beneficial to use a hybrid approach. This can involve, for example, assuming a non-malicious explanation for people’s actions, while at the same time preparing to act if the malicious explanation turns out to be true (i.e. “assume the best but prepare for the worst”).

Summary and conclusions

Hanlon’s razor is the adage that you should “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Hanlon’s razor offers numerous benefits, including helping you find the right explanation for people’s actions, helping you avoid the negative emotions associated with assuming bad intentions, improving your relationships with others, and prompting you to act.

You can expand Hanlon’s razor, to account for causes beyond malice and stupidity, including negative causes, such as carelessness, neutral causes, such as lack of experience, and even positive causes, such as that someone is taking the time to do an excellent job.

To implement Hanlon’s razor effectively, it helps to learn how to assess people’s intentions better, by understanding how to avoid patterns of thinking such as the egocentric bias, which is the tendency to rely on our own perspective when interpreting other people’s actions.

When deciding whether and how to implement Hanlon’s razor, you should consider the likelihood that the other person acted maliciously, as well as the cost of incorrectly assuming malice, or incorrectly assuming non-malicious intent.

Remember, there is always.

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