Expanding workload (Image: Paul Eekhoff/ Photographer's Choice RF/Getty)

You’re so predictable.

Offended? We’re used to the idea that nature is governed by laws that spell out how things work. But the idea that human nature is governed by such laws raises hackles. Perhaps because of this, they have often been proposed with tongue in cheek – which makes it all the more disconcerting when they turn out to be backed up by evidence.

One such law is the Peter principle, which states that in any organisation “people reach the level of their own incompetence”. As we report this week, physics-based simulations suggest that this is more than just a cynical snipe at our bosses’ competence. And that means we might have to rethink our ideas about who to promote to what jobs.


So what other laws of human nature might we have to reluctantly accept? Here are five that may – or may not – govern our lives.

Parkinson’s law

Why is there always so much work to do? Anyone searching for an explanation might find one in Parkinson’s law. Civil servant, historian and theorist Cyril Northcote Parkinson suggested in a 1955 article that work expands to fill the time available for its completion – backed up with statistical evidence drawn from his historical research. More recent mathematical analyses have lent support to the idea.

Parkinson also came up with the “law of triviality“, which states that the amount of time an organisation spends discussing an issue is inversely proportional to its importance. He argued that nobody dares to expound on important issues in case they’re wrong – but everyone is happy to opine at length about the trivial.

This in turn may be a result of Sayre’s law, which states that in any dispute, the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.

Parkinson also proposed a coefficient of inefficiency, which attempts to define the maximum size a committee can reach before it becomes unable to make decisions. His suggestion that it lay “somewhere 19.9 and 22.4” has stood the test of time: more recent research suggests that committees cannot include many more than 20 members before becoming utterly hapless.

Student syndrome

“If it weren’t for the last minute, I wouldn’t get anything done.” So said an anonymous wit, and none but the most ferociously well-organised can disagree.

In fact, procrastination is a major problem for some people, especially those who are easily distracted or are uncertain of their ability to complete a task.

One of the most well-known examples of vigorous procrastination is student syndrome. As anyone who has ever been (or known) a student will know, it is standard practice to apply yourself to a task only at the last possible moment before the deadline.

Student syndrome is so common that some experts in project management recommend not assigning long periods of time to particular tasks, because the people who are supposed to do them will simply wait until just before the deadline to start work, and the project will overrun anyway (International Journal of Project Management, vol 18, p 173).

Some of the blame for student syndrome may be laid at the feet of the planning fallacy: the tendency for people to underestimate how long it will take to do something.

If you often get caught out by how long things take, we recommend considering Hofstadter’s law, coined by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law.”

Pareto principle

The rich have a lot more money than you. That might sound like a statement of the obvious, but you may be surprised by just how much richer than you they are. In fact, in most countries 80 per cent of the wealth is owned by just 20 per cent of the population.

This was first spotted by the economist Vilfredo Pareto in the early 20th century, and it seems to be a universal rule in societies – although the precise nature of the distribution has been revised over the years.

But the Pareto principle is not just about money. For most systems, 80 per cent of events are triggered by just 20 per cent of the causes. For instance, 20 per cent of the users of a popular science website are responsible for 80 per cent of the page clicks.

Businesses often use the Pareto principle as a rule of thumb, for instance deciding to do the most important 20 per cent of a job in order to get 80 per cent of the reward.

Salem hypothesis

First proposed by Bruce Salem on the discussion site Usenet, the Salem hypothesis claims that “an education in the engineering disciplines forms a predisposition to [creationist] viewpoints”. This was rephrased somewhat by P. Z. Myers as “creationists with advanced degrees are often engineers”.

Is there any evidence to back this up, or is it just a gratuitous slander against engineers? A 1982 article in the Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science suggested that many leading creationists trained as engineers, notably Henry Morris, one of the authors of the key creationist book The Genesis Flood. But the article did not present any figures.

More recently, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog have noted a preponderance of engineers among Islamic extremist groups. They suggested that engineers may be at greater risk of being recruited by such groups than other graduates.

Obviously creationism is not the same thing as violent activism, but Gambetta and Hertog’s analysis may be useful nevertheless because they discuss the engineering mindset in some detail. They show, for instance, that engineers are more likely to be religious than other graduates (PDF).

None of this is anywhere near enough to prove the Salem hypothesis, but it does provide some intriguing circumstantial evidence.

Maes-Garreau law

Everyone loves predicting the future, and some make a career out of it. These futurists often present detailed, authoritative claims about what is going to happen, though their success rate isn’t always exemplary.

A common theme in futurist predictions is that revolutionary technology of one sort or another is just around the corner, and that this technology will allow people to live forever. This can mean physical immortality or some more abstracted technique like downloading one’s personality into a computer. The “singularity”, which Ray Kurzweil says will arrive “by 2045 or thereabouts”, is a prime example.

And thus we come to the Maes-Garreau law, which states that any such prediction about a favourable future technology will fall just within the expected lifespan of the person making it.

Pattie Maes, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, observed in the late 1980s that many of her male colleagues were interested in these ideas, and tabulated when they expected the miracle technology to arrive. Sure enough, she found that the dates they predicted for the singularity were always on or around their 70th birthdays.

She mentioned her findings in a talk, but did not write them up. Subsequently, the journalist Joel Garreau made similar observations in his book Radical Evolution, which looked at the implications of such “transhumanist” ideas.

The Maes-Garreau law was finally coined, and given its name, by Wired editor Kevin Kelly. Kelly informally repeated Maes’s analysis, confirming her findings. He then defined the “Maes-Garreau point” as the latest possible date a prediction can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the person making it.