Why We See Tigers That Aren’t There

So I want to run a scenario by you. It’s a bit absurd, but just bear with me for a second. Like I’m listening. You’re in line at the grocery store. You’re just scrolling on your phone, minding your own business, and a guy suddenly sprints in from the parking lot. He’s hyperventilating. He looks clearly terrified and he screams at the top of his lungs. There is a massive tiger roaming around the parking lot, a literal massive tiger in a suburban grocery store parking lot. Yes. Now, be honest. Do you actually believe him or do you think he’s maybe, you know, on something? Oh, I’m definitely not buying it. I mean, my first thought is it’s a prank for TikTok or maybe the guy is having some kind of mental health crisis. Tigers don’t just hang out at the local croaker. The probability of that is near zero. Right. It’s ridiculous. So you dismiss it. You go back scrolling on your phone, but then maybe 30 seconds later, a second person bursts through the automatic doors. It’s a businessman, suit and tie. And he looks completely rattled. He yells, everyone stay inside. There’s an animal attacking cars out there. Okay. Well, the suit changes things slightly. It adds this weird layer of credibility to the whole thing. I’m still not convinced it’s a tiger, but my, my ignore setting is definitely switching to alert. I’m probably walking over, look out the window now. Exactly. You’re checking. You’re gathering data, but then, and here’s the kicker. A third person runs in a mother dragging her kid by the arm. And she’s screaming that she literally saw orange and black stripes at that exact moment. What do you do? Oh, I’m gone. I am dropping the shopping basket and I am sprinting for the emergency exit in the back. Logic is completely out the window at that point, even though you haven’t seen a single stripe yourself, even though you know intellectually that a tiger in your specific zip code is statistically impossible at that moment. Statistics do not matter. Three independent data points, all screaming danger that completely overrides my internal logic to my brain. In that second, that tiger is 100% real. And that transition from thinking, this is a harmless prank to I need to run for my life is exactly what we are unpacking in today’s deep dive. We are looking at a psychological phenomenon called the illusion of validity. It’s a fascinating concept. It really is. It’s this slightly terrifying glitch where our brains decide a story is true, not because we have any hard evidence, but simply because of narrative flow, repetition and social proof. Right. It’s the exact mechanism that turns a baseless rumor into an accepted fact. It turns a terrible financial investment into a market bubble and it elevates fringe conspiracy theories into massive cultural movements. And to really understand how this works, we aren’t starting with modern psychology textbooks. We’re actually going back over 2000 years way back to the warring states period in ancient China. Yes, we are diving into an ancient text called the strategies of the warring states or Zangguo Se. Specifically, we’re looking at the origins of a very famous Chinese idiom known as Sanran Chang H. Way, which translates to three men make a tiger. Exactly. And the source material here is, it’s just incredible. It feels shockingly modern, doesn’t it? It really does. It’s this perfect synthesis of political strategy, behavioral economics, and honestly, a very cynical, realistic look at human nature. So our mission for this deep dive is to figure out why our brains are so hardwired to prefer a good story over cold facts. We’re going to look at how this quirk has shaped major historical events from ancient China all the way up to the modern boardroom. And most importantly, how we can train ourselves to stop seeing tigers that aren’t actually there. So let’s at the stage, we are in the warring states period. And for anyone listening who isn’t totally brushed up on ancient Chinese history, this is not a piece of error. No, not at all. It’s basically Game of Thrones, but real. You got seven major states constantly fighting, backstabbing each other and forming these incredibly fragile, temporary alliances. And specifically for our story, we are looking at the state of way and the state of Zau. These two states are bitter rivals, but they’ve decided they need a piece treaty. But in this era, a treaty isn’t just a piece of paper you sign with a pen. It’s a pact signed with a person, collaterr, precisely. To guarantee the peace, the king of way is required to send his own son, the crown prince, to live in the capital of Zau as a hostage. The implication being, if way attacks Zau, the prince will be executed. High stakes. But the prince obviously can’t just go alone. He needs an entourage, a shaperone, a mentor. And that brings in our main protagonist, a man named Peng Kong. Peng Kong is a high level minister. He is incredibly sharp, a brilliant strategist, but he’s just been put in a terrible, terrible position. He has been ordered to leave the king’s side and accompany the prince to Zau. And in the royal court of way, leaving the king’s immediate vicinity is basically political suicide. No, absolutely because political power in this era and frankly in our modern era, too relies entirely on proximity to the decision maker. Peng Kong knows that the very second his courage leaves for Zau, his political rivals are going to start whispering in the king’s ear. They’re going to accuse him of treason. Cree’s in disloyalty, skimming from the treasury, you name it, they will accuse him of it. So he knows this coordinated hit job is coming. He knows it’s inevitable. There’s no avoiding it. So right before he leaves, he requests a private one on one audience with the king of way. He realizes he needs to mentally inoculate the king against the lies that are about to be told. But here’s the part that I always find a little confusing in the text. If he’s the king’s most trusted advisor, why doesn’t he just come out and say that? Why not just say, Hey, your majesty, my enemies hate me and they’re going to lie about me while I’m gone. Please don’t listen to them. Why go through this whole metaphorical game? Because a direct denial is actually very weak. If he just says don’t listen to them, that’s ultimately just one man’s voice against a future mob. He needs to do more than that. He needs to plant a mental model inside the king’s brain. He needs the king to recognize the mechanism of a lie, not just the lie itself. So he uses the secratic method. He asks questions to guide the king to the realization. He does. He walks up to the king and asks, your majesty, if one man comes to you today and reports that there’s a tiger roaming in the busy marketplace, would you believe him? And the king says no, obviously a tiger in a crowded city market is completely absurd. Right. Then Pankong asks, well, what if two men came to you and reported it? The king hesitates a bit here. He says, I would suspect it might be true. The suit and tie from our grocery store example. Exactly. And then Pankong delivers the closer, he asks, what if three men came running to you and said there is a tiger in the market? And the king admits, if three men said it, yes, I would believe it. And this is the moment Pankong springs his intellectual trap. He points out the complete absurdity of the situation. He says to the king, your majesty, it is patently obvious to anyone that there is no tiger in the market. Yet three men speaking consistently can make a tiger exist out of thin air. That is just such a profound observation. He’s drawing this hard line between actual reality and mere consensus. Yeah. The reality is there is no tiger, the consensus is tiger. It’s a brilliant distinction. And Pankong uses it to deliver his final warning. He says, I am traveling to Zau, which is much, much farther away than the local market. And I can assure you, there are far more than three people who will speak against me when I’m gone. So I beg your majesty, please examine the facts. He’s basically telling the king, look, you have a bug in your mental software. I just showed you exactly how the bug works. Please do not let my enemies use it to ruin my life. That is a perfect way to phrase it. He exposed the bug. So does the inoculation work? Well, that is the real tragedy of the source material because despite this incredibly brilliant setup and despite the king explicitly agreeing to the logic of the tiger metaphor, when Pankong eventually returned from his years in Zau, the king absolutely refused to see him. You’re kidding. He still fell for it after all that. He fell for it hook, line and sinker. The rumors while Pankong was away were just too numerous. The social proof was too overwhelming. The three men created a metaphorical tiger that completely devoured Pankong’s career. That is incredibly frustrating to read about. I mean, the king is in stupid right. He fully understood the trap when it was explained to his face. So why on earth did he still walk right into it? This is where we have to shift gears and look at modern psychology. Because the king of way wasn’t fighting against a lack of intelligence. He was fighting against human biology. There are a few major psychological forces happening here. The first is what the psychologist Daniel Coniman famously calls cognitive ease. Right. Break that down for us. So your brain is fundamentally an energy conserving machine thinking critically, verifying facts, cross referencing sources. That is metabolically expensive. It takes real effort and calories, but accepting a store that just flows well. That is cheap. It’s incredibly easy. So falling for the tiger illusion is just it’s just mental laziness. I wouldn’t call it laziness. I’d call it efficiency. If a story has what we call narrative coherence, meaning it connects the dots logically and makes intuitive sense, the brain naturally wants to accept it as true. So it can quickly move on to worrying about other things. But there’s a second much bigger factor at play here, which is social proof. Right. The whole safety and numbers idea. It goes even deeper than that. Psychologists usually distinguish between two types of social influence. There’s normative social influence, which is just pure pressure wanting to fit in with the group. But then there’s informational social influence. This happens when we genuinely deeply believe that the group possesses critical knowledge that we lack. Like the third person screaming in our supermarket scenario, I have to assume that mother saw something I didn’t see. Exactly. If three separate people say there’s a tiger, the ancient evolutionary part of your brain assumes they have data you don’t to disagree with them in that moment isn’t just socially awkward. It feels actively life threatening. You are betting your physical survival that the group is wrong and taking that back to the king of way. If 10 different high ranking ministers are all telling him that Pan Kong is a traitor for him to stand up and say no, he’s not requires him to believe that 10 respected officials are all simultaneously lying or completely diluted. And that is a massive cognitive leap for anyone to make. Right. It is vastly easier to just see the tiger. Now, this creates a really dangerous dynamic when you take it out of an ancient fable or a grocery store hypothetical and put it into real world history. The sources we’re looking at highlight some historical events where this tiger effect didn’t just end the guy’s political career. It literally got thousands of people killed. Yes. The most vivid example from the historical analysis is the boxer rebellion in China right around the year 1900. This is a classic deeply tragic case of the illusion of validity meeting the harsh, unforgiving reality of physics set the scene for us. So it’s the turn of the 20th century. Northern China is suffering from a devastating drought, massive famine and deep economic despair largely driven by foreign imperialism and spheres of influence. The local populace is incredibly desperate. And out of this intense desperation rises a populist militia group that becomes known as the boxers and their core claim, their version of the tiger in the market was that they were completely invulnerable to physical harm. Right. Yes. They spread this narrative that through specific physical rituals, spiritual intentions and martial arts training, they could transform into spirit soldiers. They genuinely claimed that Western bullets would literally bounce right off their bodies, which is objectively demonstrably false. So how do you get an entire massive movement to firmly believe something that could be disproven instantly, but well, by just getting shot? It always starts with one man, a local leader performs a trick. Maybe it’s a stage demonstration in a village square where a sword seemingly doesn’t cut him or maybe they use blanks in a firearm. He stands up and tells the story. I am protected by the spirits, the first man in the market. Right. Then his devoted followers, the second man, start repeating it everywhere they go. I was there. I saw it. The sword didn’t leave the scratch. Now the next village overhears it from multiple sources. And here is where the repetition effect aggressively kicks in. When you hear the phrase, we are invulnerable, chanted thousands of times. When you see it written on banners, when it’s repeated by your trusted neighbors every single day, it constructs an impenetrable reality tunnel. It becomes a closed loop. If you doubt the invulnerability, you aren’t just seen as a skeptic. You’re a heretic or a traitor to the rebellion. Exactly. And the real tragedy is the sheer scale of the belief. By the summer of 1900, tens of thousands of boxers confidently marched on Beijing to physically fight the foreign allied powers. They charged straight into organized lines of modern riflemen and maxim machine guns. Fully believing the bullets wouldn’t pierce their skin. And they were absolutely mowed down. It’s horrific to read about, but it perfectly demonstrates the terrifying power of the illusion. The tiger of invulnerability was so vividly real to them that they wagered their lives on it. Reality, actual physics, only intervene at the point of impact. It’s so interesting because we usually like to comfort ourselves by thinking that truth naturally wins out in the end. But in these historical cases, the narrative completely defeated the truth right up until that final fatal moment. A good narrative is always faster than the truth. And we see this pop up again and again in history. The outline mentions the on Lushan rebellion too during the Tang Dynasty. Yes, another massive conflict driven by fabricated narratives. Right. You had Ember’s Wanzong completely paralyzed because Am Lushan, this powerful general basically manufactured an endless stream of reports. He either created the illusion of imminent threats to justify moving troops. Or he used his allies at court to repeat the narrative that he was a loyal servant masking his creasing. And again, it’s the sheer volume of the reports. If one advisor says, and Lushan is a rebel, the emperor investigates. If 50 advisors who have been bought off or manipulated say he’s loyal, the emperor believes the illusion of validity. That rebellion nearly destroyed the Tang Dynasty and bringing it closer to the modern era. The other historical example that really stood out in the deep dive notes was the cultural revolution. Now this felt different to me. It wasn’t about magical thinking or military strategy. It was about the weaponization of guilt. Yes. This is three men make a tiger industrialized by a political state. In the 1960s and 70s, you had this widespread phenomenon of the daisy bow, the big character posters. People would write these vicious accusations against their university professors, their landlords or even just their neighbors and paste these massive posters on public walls. Like professor lies is dangerous counter revolutionary. Exactly. Now if you walk by and see one poster saying that you might ignore it, you might think the person writing it has a personal grudge, but imagine walking to work and seeing 50 identical posters written in 50 different hand writings, all loudly declaring, Professor Lee is a counter revolutionary. Even if you’ve known Professor Lee for 20 years and know he’s a harmless, good guy, you inevitably start to question your own judgment. You start thinking, wow, maybe they know something I don’t. And it gets worse. Professor Lee himself starts to question his own reality. There are numerous heartbreaking accounts from that era of innocent people confessing to ridiculous crimes they absolutely didn’t commit. And it wasn’t just because of physical coercion or torture. It was because the sheer overwhelming weight of the collective accusation simply broke their grip on reality. Yeah, they internalized the tiger. They did. They reached a breaking point where they thought the masses cannot possibly be wrong. If thousands of people say I am an enemy of the state, I must be an enemy of the state. That is the ultimate darkness of this psychological quirk. It is so powerful, it can literally rewrite your own identity. That is deeply terrifying. It really makes you realize just how incredibly fragile our daily grip on objective truth actually is. So let’s pivot to something a bit more constructive. We have the diagnosis now. We know our brains are incredibly prone to the solution. What is the cure? How do we fight it? Well, the cure actually comes from the exact same ancient era as the disease. The story of Pan Kong is preserved within the legalist tradition of Chinese philosophy. And it’s specifically associated with the famous philosopher Han Fightsy legalism, just to clarify for everyone, that’s the philosophical school that basically says human beings are inherently selfish. And you need strict objective laws to keep society functioning. Right? Roughly yes. Han Fightsy was the ultimate realist. He didn’t believe in relying on the innate virtue of rulers or the moral goodness of royal advisors. He assumed every single person had a hidden agenda. So to combat the illusion of validity, he developed a rigid, conceptual framework called shun ming zhi. Soon ming zhi, which translates to what? It translates to examine names to find reality or in more modern terms, match the claim directly to the objective fact. Okay, that sounds like a great inspirational poster for a newsroom. Check the facts. But we just spent the last 10 minutes establishing that checking facts is metabolically exhausting and goes against our biology. How do you actually implement that? Han Fightsy argued that you cannot rely on individual skepticism. Humans will always fail at that. You have to build iron clad systems. He talked extensively about the two handles reward and punishment. You have to architect a system where verifying the hard truth is actively rewarded and spreading a false tiger is severely punished. So practically speaking, the wise ruler doesn’t just sit on his throes, stroking his beard, thinking, hmm, I wonder if those three guys are telling the truth about the market. No, absolutely not. The wise ruler immediately sends a fourth man to the market. But and this is the absolute key to the whole concept. The fourth man’s only job is to verify the tiger. He isn’t a part of the courtroom or mill. He has no political skin in the game. He is strictly an independent objective auditor. So you structuralize the skepticism. You build a process that doesn’t care about the narrative. Exactly. And let’s bring this directly into our modern day to day lives. We don’t have royal courtiers whispering in our ears, but we absolutely have corporate hiring committees. Well, this is such a great example. I’ve seen this happens so many times. Think about the halo effect and human resources. This is a very common modern tiger. You get a candidate’s resume across your desk. It says they worked at Google for five years. They went to Harvard. That’s the first man in the market saying there’s a tiger. That elite brand name screams competence to your brain. Right. Then they come in for the interview and the hiring manager loves them because they’re incredibly charismatic and articulate. That’s the second man. Then a polite reference check comes back positive. That’s the third man. So you hire them offering a massive salary, but you never actually sat them down to check if they could write a single line of code or close a sales deal or do whatever the actual job requires. You just bought the narrative coherence of the elite candidate. And we’ve all seen exactly how that plays out. The person gets hired. They start on Monday. And within a month, you realize they are a complete disaster. They can’t do the work. Because no one in the entire HR pipeline acted as the fourth man. No one administered a blind work sample test. No one looked at the raw, unvarnished data of their actual output. They just looked at the shiny educational badges and the charismatic smile. So in a corporate setting, the fourth man is the blonde skills assessment. It’s the rigid mechanism that completely ignores the candidate’s personal story and strictly looks at the output. Yes. It’s systematic due diligence. And you see this exact same failure in venture capital and finance to the concept of FOMO, the fear of missing out is literally just three men make a tiger with a billion dollar price tag attached. Oh, 100%. Everyone is investing in this new crypto exchange. Sequoia capital is in. And raising Horowitz is in you have to invest now. And because everyone is in and the narrative flows so well, you just assume the hard due diligence has already been done by the experts. You assume the tiger profitability is real, but what often happens in reality is that Sequoia is assumed on recent check the books and on recent assumes Sequoia checked the books. It’s just an endless recursive circle of tigers. It’s a circle of highly paid finance, bros, pointing at an empty suburban parking lot screaming about a tiger and then a company like FTX completely collapses overnight because almost no one bothered to send the fourth man to actually look at the underlying bank accounts or the code. And we see it in healthcare too, right? The medical fans. Someone says this random supplement cured their brain fog. Then an influencer repeats it. Then a podcast host mentions it suddenly millions of people are buying it, creating this massive illusion of validity, even though there’s literally zero double blind clinical data proving it does anything. Exactly. The anecdote becomes the data or look at modern conspiracy theories. Why do people fall down these radical rabbit holes on the internet? Because conspiracies are incredibly coherent. They perfectly connect all the random chaotic dots of world events into one neat, terrifying story that constructed perfect tiger. They construct a flawless tiger. The story makes so much intuitive sense to the believer, but it completely lacks any foundational verifiable evidence. This feels like the ultimate overarching lesson of this entire deep dive. As a society, we rely way too heavily on proxies for the truth. We look at brand names. We look at follower counts on social media. We look at rising stock prices. And we use those metrics as a cheap shortcut for reality. And Han Feizy, sitting in ancient China, would tell us, stop looking at the proxies. Look at the actual thing itself. Reality is not a democracy. It absolutely does not matter if a million people stand up and say the tiger is there. If there are no physical stripes, there is no tiger. But doing that is hard work. It means you have to be the buzzkill. You have to be the one annoying person in the marketing meeting who raises their hand and says, I know we all really love this campaign idea. But where is the actual data supporting it? It is exhausting work. And it’s socially expensive. You constantly risk looking like the outsider, the skeptic, the person not playing along. But think about the alternative. The alternative is being the king of way, permanently locking out your most brilliant loyal advisor because you believed a manufactured lie or in the extreme being the boxer rebel marching confidently into machine gunfire. Yeah. When you frame it like that, being the office buzzkill sounds like a pretty great deal. It’s a necessary survival skill in the modern world. So let’s wrap this up. We’ve gone on quite a journey today from the treacherous royal courts of ancient way to the battlefields of the boxer rebellion all the way to modern HR departments and crypto collapses. And the through line is incredibly clear. Our human brains deeply crave narrative coherence and social consensus. And that biological craving leaves us incredibly vulnerable to the illusion of validity. I think the main practical takeaway for anyone listening is to start recognizing that specific internal feeling of certainty, you know, that comfortable feeling that washes over you when you hear a talking point for the third or fourth time and you find yourself just naturally nodding along. When you feel that happening, that is the exact moment you need to wake up. That is the moment to pause and ask yourself, have I actually seen this tiger with my own two eyes? Or have I just heard the report from three other people? You have to choose to be the fourth man. Be the fourth man. Build rigid systems in your daily life, whether it’s actively seeking out the primary source document of a viral news article or demanding the raw Excel data before a major pivot at work. Build the habits that force you to bypass the rumor mill entirely. I absolutely love that. And to close out this deep dive, I have a question for you, the listener, to take with you today. It’s easy to listen to this and think, I’m smart. I’m educated. I would never fall for the fake tiger. But I want you to honestly look at your own life right now. Maybe it’s a deep grudge you’re holding against a coworker and it’s based entirely on office gossip you’ve never verified. Or maybe it’s a strong political stance you are 100% certain of. But if you’re being honest, you’ve never actually read the opposing legislation. Or maybe it’s volatile tech stock you’re holding in your portfolio simply because a forum on Reddit repeatedly said it was going to the moon. Exactly. Where in your life are you accepting the existence of a tiger just because three people confidently pointed at it. And more importantly, are you brave enough to walk out into the market and check for yourself? It’s a scary thing to do. You might just find out you were completely wrong. But hey, at least you’ll be living in reality. Thanks for diving in with us today. See you next time.