"All Behavior Makes Sense with Enough Information"

Marc Green

A man was building a new house in a rural area. For cooking, heating, and hot water, he had a new propane tank installed in his back yard. He hired a tradesman to lay a pipe from the propane tank to the hot water tank. However, the tradesman then said that he had to leave. The homeowner replied that he could complete the job himself. The tradesman said OK, but told him that after turning on the propane tank he would have to bleed the air out of the pipe before making the connection. The next day the homeowner turned on the propane tank and returned to his basement to bleed off the air. He got down on his hands and knees to sniff the end of the pipe for gas. No gas smell. He continued to sniff for a while. Still no gas smell. He finally decided to check for the gas by lighting a match which he put to the pipe end. BOOM. The clothes were literally burned off his body and he was severely injured.

I recently ran across the quote (Housel, 2025) that is the title of this article. It immediately made me think of an accident that I investigated several years ago. The section above provides a broad outline of the facts. It seems that this man could be the poster boy for the Darwin Awards by acting so stupidly. Who would be idiotic enough to check for gas with a match? Well, as Paul Harvey used to say...

“Now for the rest of the story”

1. The homeowner was not alone. He had a friend visiting at the time, who also sniffed the pipe and confirmed that there was no gas smell. This provided social confirmation. (The friend was farther from the pipe when explosion occurred and was not as severely injured.);

2. Before leaving, the tradesman had told the homeowner that it might take a long time for the air to bleed out. The homeowner was then not expecting the gas to be present until a long, and uncertain, time had passed;

3. The homeowner had received a bumpf of literature from the gas company concerning the safe use of the propane gas. Time and again, it warned him in big bold print that whenever he smelled gas, there was a danger of fire and explosion. If you think about it, the message was;

smell of gas = danger
no smell of gas = safety

So the gas company told the homeowner that as long as he could not smell any gas there was no danger. The homeowner smelled no gas, so he believed that there was none present. The lighting of the match was just to confirm what he had already concluded, a belief strengthened by social validation and the expectation that it would take some time for the air to bleed out; and

4. The explanation for the event lay in a fact that was not obvious. Propane has no smell. The normal “gas smell” is due to an odorant, methyl mercaptan, which is added to the gas. However, the inside of new propane tanks is coated with a chemical that oxidizes the methyl mercaptan, rendering it odorless. This explains why the homeowner didn’t smell the gas flowing in the pipe. The gas company’s literature did note this fact, but the warning was buried in small print and deep in the reams of paper that warned the homeowner of the danger that accompanied the smell of gas.

Now that you know the rest of the story, and putting away hindsight bias, do you still thing that the man had no reason to act as he did? The gas company literature told him that there was only danger if he smelled gas, and he had social confirmation that there was no gas, which might take a long time to flow through the pipe to the house.

But there is more.

5. The homeowner had previously owned a restaurant that had gas stoves. Periodically, a technician from the appliance company came by to service the stoves. As a final test of whether the gas was flowing properly, the technician lit each burner—wait for it...with a match. If a professional gas technician used a match, then it must be a normal procedure. Moreover, using the match to test for gas had merely ignited a flame. It had not resulted in a large explosion.

6. I have explained in discussing the Law of Effect that incentive structure, the active operant contingencies, is usually the most important circumstantial influence on behavior. Another fact in the scenario is that when he left, the tradesman said he could not come back for a week. The homeowner’s contingency was to wait a week for the reinforcement of having the job completed (if he believed the tradesman would actually return as promised, but everyone knows how little tradesmen can believed about such things) so that he could finally get some hot water. Alternatively, the homeowner could do the job himself and receive the reinforcement immediately. As explained, immediate reinforcement is far more potent than delayed reinforcement. Moreover, the homeowner might also receive some reinforcing sense of control and accomplishment by doing the task usually performed by a trained professional.

Conclusion

The point of this story is not whether the homeowner was or was not “stupid.” The point is, as the title says, that “All behavior makes sense with enough information.” Given the background, it is easy to see why the man believed that holding a match to the pipe was not dangerous. His personal experiences and the contingencies shaped his world-view. Without knowing those experiences, his behavior seems inexplicable. Now it makes at least some sense.

There is also a larger lesson here that extends far beyond accident investigation. Too often, when the behaviors of others seem inexplicable (and usually negative), people are quick to judge and to simply label the actor as “stupid,” “careless,” “negligent, “mad,” etc. as if these were causal explanations for their actions. They are not. The labels just are Folk Psychology explanations of behavior based on invisible, inferred mental states and circular reasoning. They have no explanatory power. Certainly, individuals may genetically have different dispositions, but you can be sure that their actions make sense to them based on their understanding of the world. This understanding is created by some combination of the past (experiences), the present (situational factors, especially the contingencies), and the future (goals). It is easy to make someone appear foolish, or worse, by pointing only the present circumstances when you haven’t had the same experiences or are pursuing the same goals or when the operant contingencies are not considered.

The use of labels is seductive. It is reinforcing because it provides simplicity, the cognitive ease that we humans so treasure. It also affords the labeler the feeling smugness and superiority. But as William James (1890) said, “labels only give the illusion of understanding.”

This does not mean that it is necessary to approve of the behavior or to see it in a positive light. People tend to shy away from understanding the reasons for behavior which seems outrageous or heinous because it might indicate sympathy with the actor. But if the goal is to understand and possibly prevent such behavior in the future, then finding information about the persons past, situation (contingencies) and future is critical. In sum.

If you want to understand human error, you have to assume that people were doing reasonable things given the complexities, dilemmas, trade-offs and uncertainty that surrounded them… The point of understanding human error is to reconstruct why actions and assessments that are now controversial made sense to people at the time….You have to reconstruct, rebuild their circumstances, resituate the controversial actions and assessments in the flow of behaviour of which they were part and see how they reasonably fit the world that existed around people at the time. (Dekker, 2006)

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