Unintended consequences

Perverse results[edit]
See also: Perverse incentive and Perverse subsidies
In 2003, Barbra Streisand unsuccessfully sued Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for posting a photograph of her home online.^[45] Before the lawsuit had been filed, only 6 people had downloaded the file, two of them Streisand's attorneys.^[46] The lawsuit drew attention to the image, resulting in 420,000 people visiting the site.^[47] The Streisand Effect was named after this incident, describing when an attempt to censor or remove a certain piece of information instead draws attention to the material being suppressed, resulting in the material instead becoming widely known, reported on, and distributed.^[48]
Passenger-side airbags in motorcars were intended as a safety feature, but led to an increase in child fatalities in the mid-1990s because small children were being hit by airbags that deployed automatically during collisions. The supposed solution to this problem, moving the child seat to the back of the vehicle, led to an increase in the number of children forgotten in unattended vehicles, some of whom died under extreme temperature conditions.^[49]
Risk compensation, or the Peltzman effect, occurs after implementation of safety measures intended to reduce injury or death (e.g. bike helmets, seatbelts, etc.). People may feel safer than they really are and take additional risks which they would not have taken without the safety measures in place. This may result in no change, or even an increase, in morbidity or mortality, rather than a decrease as intended.
According to an anecdote, the British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobra snakes in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. This was a successful strategy as large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, enterprising people began breeding cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, they scrapped the reward program, causing the cobra breeders to set the now-worthless snakes free. As a result, the wild cobra population further increased. The apparent solution for the problem made the situation even worse, becoming known as the Cobra effect.
Theobald Mathew's temperance campaign in 19th-century Ireland resulted in thousands of people vowing never to drink alcohol again. This led to the consumption of diethyl ether, a much more dangerous intoxicant—owing to its high flammability—by those seeking to become intoxicated without breaking the letter of their pledge.^[50][51]
It was thought that adding south-facing conservatories to British houses would reduce energy consumption by providing extra insulation and warmth from the sun. However, people tended to use the conservatories as living areas, installing heating and ultimately increasing overall energy consumption.^[52]
A reward for lost nets found along the Normandy coast was offered by the French government between 1980 and 1981. This resulted in people vandalizing nets to collect the reward.^[53]
Beginning in the 1940s and continuing into the 1960s, the Canadian federal government gave the Catholic Church in Quebec $2.25 per day per psychiatric patient for their cost of care, but only $0.75 a day per orphan. The perverse result is that the orphan children were diagnosed as mentally ill so the church could receive the larger amount of money. This psychiatric misdiagnosis affected up to 20,000 people, and the children are known as the Duplessis Orphans.^[54][55][56]
There have been attempts to curb the consumption of sugary beverages by imposing a tax on them. However, a study found that the reduced consumption was only temporary. Also, there was an increase in the consumption of beer among households.^[57]
The New Jersey Childproof Handgun Law, which was intended to protect children from accidental discharge of firearms by forcing all future firearms sold in New Jersey to contain "smart" safety features, has delayed, if not stopped entirely, the introduction of such firearms to New Jersey markets. The wording of the law caused significant public backlash,^[58] fuelled by gun rights lobbyists,^[59][60] and several shop owners offering such guns received death threats and stopped stocking them.^[61][62] In 2014, 12 years after the law was passed, it was suggested the law be repealed if gun rights lobbyists agree not to resist the introduction of "smart" firearms.^[63]
Drug prohibition can lead drug traffickers to prefer stronger, more dangerous substances, that can be more easily smuggled and distributed than other, less concentrated substances.^[64]
Televised drug prevention advertisements may lead to increased drug use.^[65]
Increasing usage of search engines, also including recent image search features, has contributed in the ease of which media is consumed. Some abnormalities in usage may have shifted preferences for pornographic film actors, as the producers began using common search queries or tags to label the actors in new roles.^[66]
The passage of the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act has led to a reported increase in risky behaviors by sex workers as a result of quashing their ability to seek and screen clients online, forcing them back onto the streets or into the dark web. The ads posted were previously an avenue for advocates to reach out to those wanting to escape the trade.^[67]
The use of precision guided munitions meant to reduce the rate of civilian casualties encouraged armies to narrow their safety margins, and increase the use of deadly force in densely populated areas. This in turn increased the danger to uninvolved civilians, who in the past would have been out of the line of fire because of armies' aversion of using higher-risk weaponry in densely populated areas.^[68] The perceived ability to operate precision weaponry from afar (where in the past heavy munitions or troop deployment would have been needed) also led to the expansion of the list of potential targets.^[68] As put by Michael Walzer: "Drones not only make it possible for us to get at our enemies, they may also lead us to broaden the list of enemies, to include presumptively hostile individuals and militant organizations simply because we can get at them–even if they aren’t actually involved in attacks against us."^[69] This idea is also echoed by Grégoire Chamayou: "In a situation of moral hazard, military action is very likely to be deemed 'necessary' simply because it is possible, and possible at a lower cost."^[70]
Other[edit]
According to Lynn White, the invention of the horse stirrup enabled new patterns of warfare that eventually led to the development of feudalism (see Stirrup Thesis).^[71]
Perverse consequences of environmental intervention[edit]
Most modern technologies have negative consequences that are both unavoidable and unpredictable. For example, almost all environmental problems, from chemical pollution to global warming, are the unexpected consequences of the application of modern technologies. Traffic congestion, deaths and injuries from car accidents, air pollution, and global warming are unintended consequences of the invention and large scale adoption of the automobile. Hospital infections are the unexpected side-effect of antibiotic resistance, and even human population growth leading to environmental degradation is the side effect of various technological (i.e., agricultural and industrial) revolutions.^[72]
Because of the complexity of ecosystems, deliberate changes to an ecosystem or other environmental interventions will often have (usually negative) unintended consequences. Sometimes, these effects cause permanent irreversible changes. Examples include:

• 
  During the Four Pests Campaign a killing of sparrows was declared. Chinese leaders later realized that sparrows ate a large amount of insects, as well as grains. Rather than being increased, rice yields after the campaign were substantially decreased.^[73]
  
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  During the Great Plague of London a killing of dogs and cats was ordered. If left untouched, they would have made a significant reduction in the rat population that carried the fleas which transmitted the disease.^[74]
  
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  The installation of smokestacks to decrease pollution in local areas, resulting in spread of pollution at a higher altitude, and acid rain on an international scale.^[75][76]
  
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  After about 1900, public demand led the US government to fight forest fires in the American West, and set aside land as national forests and parks to protect them from fires. This policy led to fewer fires, but also led to growth conditions such that, when fires did occur, they were much larger and more damaging. Modern research suggests that this policy was misguided, and that a certain level of wildfires is a natural and important part of forest ecology.^[77]
  
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  Side effects of climate engineering to counter global warming could involve even further warming as a consequence of reflectivity-reducing afforestation or crop yield reductions and rebound effects after solar dimming measures with even more accelerated warming.^[78][79]
  
• 
  Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's and Spread the Net's well-intentioned attempt to save lives by providing mosquito nets caused environmental and human destruction, as many of the people provided with these mosquito nets decided they were better used as fishing nets, leading to overfishing and similar noxious unintended consequences.^[80][81][82]
  

See also[edit]

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  Boomerang effect (psychology) – Unintended effect of persuasion
  
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  Collateral damage – Damage to things that are incidental to the intended target
  
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  Dutch disease – Theory in economics
  
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  Heterogony of ends
  
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  Ethics in mathematics – Emerging field of applied ethics
  
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  Externality – In economics, an imposed cost or benefit
  
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  Instrumental and value-rational action – Philosophical terms
  
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  Knightian uncertainty – Lack of quantifiable knowledge in economics
  
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  Map–territory relation – Relationship between an object and a representation of that object
  
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  Moral hazard – Increases in the exposure to risk when insured, or when another bears the cost
  
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  Parable of the broken window – Parable by French economist Frédéric Bastiat
  
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  Rebound effect
  
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  Parkinson's law – Adage that work expands to fill its available time
  
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  System accident – Unanticipated interaction of multiple failures in a complex system
  
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  Systemantics
  
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  Technology assessment – Research area dealing with trends in science and technology and related social developments
  
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  The Rhetoric of Reaction (appearing as the "perversity thesis")
  
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  Tragedy of the commons – Self-interests causing depletion of a shared resource
  
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  Virtuous circle and vicious circle – Complex chain of events that reinforces itself through a feedback loop
  

Notes[edit]

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