by Annie Duke
* Because self-serving bias promotes an inaccurate view of the world, it raises the question of how self-serving bias has survived natural selection. There may be an evolutionary basis for this potentially costly self-deception. People who are self-confident attract better mates, improving the chances their genes get passed on. Because we are good at detecting deception, to deceive others about our self-confidence, we had to first deceive ourselves. As evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers noted in his foreword to the original 1976 edition of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, the evolution of self-deception is much more complicated than previously imagined. “Thus, the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naïve view of mental evolution.” Dawkins, in turn, considered Trivers, for his work, one of the heroes of his groundbreaking book, devoting four chapters of The Selfish Gene to developing Trivers’s ideas.
* This is a systematic bias, not a guarantee that we always grab credit or always deflect blame. There are some people, to be sure, who exhibit the opposite of self-serving bias, treating everything bad that happens as their fault and attributing anything good in their lives to luck. That pattern is much rarer (and more likely in women). Several sources in the Selected Bibliography and Recommendations for Further Reading describe these aspects of self-serving bias. James Shepperd and colleagues, in particular, surveyed the literature in Social and Personality Psychology Compass for the motivations and explanations behind self-serving bias. Their survey includes research on self-serving bias in women. In addition to being a potential symptom of depression, that pattern isn’t any better because it is equally inaccurate. All bad things can’t be your fault and all good things can’t be due to luck, just as the reverse can’t be true. If we can’t find a way to value accuracy in fielding outcomes, we are going to throw away a lot of learning opportunities regardless of which kind of error we make.
* The Cubs had an outstanding season in 2015 and won the World Series in 2016. Since the day after the 2003 incident, Bartman had refused all opportunities to comment or become part of the subsequent story—that is until August 2017, when the Cubs offered and Bartman accepted a World Series ring. Bartman used the opportunity to issue a statement about how we treat each other. NPR.org quoted part of his statement: “‘Although I do not consider myself worthy of such an honor,’ Steve Bartman said in a statement, ‘I am deeply moved and sincerely grateful . . . I humbly receive the ring not only as a symbol of one of the most historic achievements in sports, but as an important reminder for how we should treat each other in today’s society.’”
* Ivan Pavlov’s work was so revolutionary that “behavioral research” as we commonly understand it didn’t even exist. Pavlov was a physician and physiologist, researching the canine digestive system.
* These numbers are obviously made up but are at least a decent approximation in reality. If the worst poker player in the world finds 0 of 100 learning opportunities, the best poker player in the world is nowhere near 100 for 100. Remember, Phil Ivey (who has earned over $20 million in tournament poker and potentially a much higher figure in high-stakes cash games) still obsesses over mistakes he made in some of his biggest triumphs.
* Erik is one of the best and most respected poker players of all time. He has won (at this writing) eight World Series of Poker championship bracelets and over $30 million in tournament poker winnings. When I started playing in the World Series at Binion’s Horseshoe in the early nineties, he had already won events there three years running.
* Thanks to Phil Tetlock for giving me that great turn of phrase.
* Thomas was paraphrasing a quote often attributed to Mark Twain: “Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.”
* When we are in a position of influence over an enterprise’s hiring and culture, the same ideas apply. Hiring to a truthseeking charter and shaping a culture that rewards people for exploratory thought and expression of diverse viewpoints will serve an enterprise well. In fact, if we don’t actively promote such a policy, we risk discouraging truthseeking due to people with diverse viewpoints feeling isolated or selecting out. One of the chief concerns of Heterodox Academy is figuring out how to get more conservatives to become social scientists or engage in exploratory thought with social scientists. That’s a tough sell: no one likes the idea of being the lone holdout in a real-life version of 12 Angry Men, especially with their reputation and livelihood at stake.
* There is an entire field of study on mental time travel and its benefits to decision-making. Neuroscientist Endel Tulving, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, pioneered analysis and research into chronesthesia, the term for mental time travel through the ability to be aware of our past or future. For further material on the neuroscience of time travel and its decision-making benefits, see the Selected Bibliography and Recommendations for Further Reading.
* Of course, being in deliberative mind is no guarantee of rationality. As I’ve noted regarding Dan Kahan’s work on motivated reasoning, people performing complicated tasks with statistics—clearly a deliberative- or System 2–type task—were susceptible to reasoning to make the math come out consistent with their prior beliefs. And the people with the most math skill had the strongest tendency to do that. Daniel Kahneman has also recognized that System 2 should not be considered immune to bias.
We are capable of all kinds of irrationality in deliberative mind. If we get out of reflexive mind, however, we can reduce the likelihood of emotionally driven decisions and decrease the influence of bias through self-reflection and vigilance. One way to do this is to take advantage of mental time-travel strategies.
* From four-year-olds to adults, temporal discounting is a universal issue. The most famous experiment about the difficulty (and importance) of being patient, known as the Marshmallow Test, was performed by professor Walter Mischel and colleagues at Stanford starting in the early 1960s. At Stanford’s Bing Nursery School, they offered children a choice between a smaller reward (like one marshmallow) that they could have immediately, or a larger reward (like two marshmallows) if they were willing to wait, alone, for up to twenty minutes. The children used every imaginable trick to wait for the larger reward. They made faces, covered their eyes, turned their chairs around, cupped their hands around the marshmallow without touching it, covered their mouths, smelled the marshmallow, and carried on wordless conversations (from nearly imperceptible admonitions to animated arguments). Mischel and his colleagues saw struggles that “could bring tears to your eyes, have you applauding their creativeness and cheering them on, and give you fresh hope” for the potential of young children.
Subsequent studies following up on the marshmallow kids have shown that the ability to delay gratification is correlated with markers of success throughout adolescence and into adulthood: higher SAT scores, better social and cognitive functioning ratings, lower body mass index, lower likelihood of addiction, better sense of self-worth, and higher ability to pursue goals and adapt to frustration and stress.
* For a good overview on the research in this area, see “The Future of Memory: Remembering, Imagining, and the Brain,” by Daniel Schacter and colleagues, cited in the Selected Bibliography and Recommendations for Further Reading.
* Professor Ronald Howard, director of the Decisions and Ethics Center at Stanford and the founder of decision analysis, uses countless entertaining variations of how decision bias gets exposed in the common but bothersome flat-tire situation. My favorite is his version where a guy gets a flat tire in front of a mental hospital. A patient from the hospital watches through the fence as the guy, affected by having an audience, steps on the hub cap holding the four nuts from the tire he removed, and they roll down a sewer. The guy feels angry, flustered, helpless. The patient calls through the fence, “Why don’t you remove one nut from each of the other three tires and put those three on the spare?”
The guy says, “That’s a brilliant idea. What are you doing in a place like this?” The patient tells him, “I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid.”
* Tilt doesn’t just result from bad outcomes, although that is the more likely impetus. Poker players also talk about winner’s tilt, where a series of good outcomes distorts decision-making, particularly in causing a player to play as if their win rate is not a momentary fluctuation from the mean but will continue at that rate in the future. In the euphoric, in-the-moment feeling of a big uptick, winners can make irrational in-game decisions or overestimate their level of skill and accomplishment and commit themselves to play for higher stakes.
* I joined the ASAS board of directors in 2009. The consulting was part of my work as a board member.
* I was asking them, for each grant, to calculate the expected value, which is the average long-run value calculated by multiplying the probability of each possible outcome by the likelihood each outcome will occur and taking the sum of those values.
* NFL teams have the advantage of advanced analytics, but a fan with basic knowledge of the game can plug in general probabilities. (These don’t include adjustment for New England’s defense or data specific to short-yardage situations.) If Wilson drops back to pass, he is about 8% to get sacked (significant loss of yardage, use of the final time-out), 55% to complete the pass (touchdown), 35% to throw incomplete (stopping the clock for two additional plays, which can include an unsuccessful running play because of the remaining time-out), and 2% to throw an interception.
If Wilson hands off to Marshawn Lynch, he either gains a yard and scores, is stopped short of the goal, or fumbles. Lynch fumbles 1%–2% of the time. After that, advanced analytics are necessary (and may be based on small samples). But we can guess. On fourth-down running plays (presumably short-yardage situations), in 13 career attempts he has 2 touchdowns and 7 first downs. For his career, at the time of this writing, on third- or fourth-and-short rushing plays, he has 121 attempts, 11 touchdowns, and 70 first downs.
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