Description-Induced Transformation of the Described: How an Account Put to Use Can Change What It Accounts For

Descriptions can help produce the situations against which they are later judged. A rating, forecast, label, or model can guide treatment, change conduct or conditions, and shape the evidence subsequently offered as confirmation. This paper develops Description-Induced Transformation of the Described, the mechanism through which an account put to use becomes one of the causes of what it describes. The analysis separates a description’s accuracy when it was made from its effects after adoption. Establishing the mechanism requires evidence that the description changed a causal input; resemblance between an account and later events is insufficient. The transformation may reinforce or undermine the description, whether or not it was initially accurate. The discussion relates this account to the self-fulfilling prophecy and its self-defeating counterpart. Historical research on option-pricing theory at the Chicago Board Options Exchange provides the documented case. The paper examines competing interpretations of whether traders’ use of pricing theory helped bring market prices closer to its predictions, preserving the dispute over the extent of that effect. Part of the Relational Conditions and Dynamics series within On Human Modeling, the paper identifies questions for evaluating descriptions that influence their subjects: how the account was used, what it changed, which evidence preceded its use, and whether those described can contest the treatment it organizes.