The most important development in the field since Meehl’s original work is Robyn Dawes’s famous article “The Robust Beauty of Improper Linear Models in Decision Making.” The dominant statistical practice in the social sciences is to assign weights to the different predictors by following an algorithm, called multiple regression, that is now built into conventional software. The logic of multiple regression is unassailable: it finds the optimal formula for putting together a weighted combination of the predictors. However, Dawes observed that the complex statistical algorithm adds little or no value. One can do just as well by selecting a set of scores that have some validity for predicting the outcome and adjusting the values to make them comparable (by using standard scores or ranks). A formula that combines these predictors with equal weights is likely to be just as accurate in predicting new cases as the multiple-regression formula that was optimal in the original sample. More recent research went further: formulas that assign equal weights to all the predictors are often superior, because they are not affected by accidents of sampling.
The surprising success of equal-weighting schemes has an important practical implication: it is possible to develop useful algorithms without any prior statistical research. Simple equally weighted formulas based on existing statistics or on common sense are often very good predictors of significant outcomes. In a memorable example, Dawes showed that marital stability is well predicted by a formula:
frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels
You don’t want your result to be a negative number.
The important conclusion from this research is that an algorithm that is constructed on the back of an envelope is often good enough to compete with an optimally weighted formula, and certainly good enough to outdo expert judgment. This logic can be applied in many domains, ranging from the selection of stocks by portfolio managers to the choices of medical treatments by doctors or patients.
A classic application of this approach is a simple algorithm that has saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of infants. Obstetricians had always known that an infant who is not breathing normally within a few minutes of birth is at high risk of brain damage or death. Until the anesthesiologist Virginia Apgar intervened in 1953, physicians and midwives used their clinical judgment to determine whether a baby was in distress. Different practitioners focused on different cues. Some watched for breathing problems while others monitored how soon the baby cried. Without a standardized procedure, danger signs were often missed, and many newborn infants died.
One day over breakfast, a medical resident asked how Dr. Apgar would make a systematic assessment of a newborn. “That’s easy,” she replied. “You would do it like this.” Apgar jotted down five variables (heart rate, respiration, reflex, muscle tone, and color) and three scores (0, 1, or 2, depending on the robustness of each sign). Realizing that she might have made a breakequthrough that any delivery room could implement, Apgar began rating infants by this rule one minute after they were born. A baby with a total score of 8 or above was likely to be pink, squirming, crying, grimacing, with a pulse of 100 or more—in good shape. A baby with a score of 4 or below was probably bluish, flaccid, passive, with a slow or weak pulse—in need of immediate intervention. Applying Apgar’s score, the staff in delivery rooms finally had consistent standards for determining which babies were in trouble, and the formula is credited for an important contribution to reducing infant mortality. The Apgar test is still used every day in every delivery room. Atul Gawande’s recent A Checklist Manifesto provides many other examples of the virtues of checklists and simple rules.
The Hostility to Algorithms
From the very outset, clinical psychologists responded to Meehl’s ideas with hostility and disbelief. Clearly, they were in the grip of an illusion of skill in terms of their ability to make long-term predictions. On reflection, it is easy to see how the illusion came about and easy to sympathize with the clinicians’ rejection of Meehl’s research.
The statistical evidence of clinical inferiority contradicts clinicians’ everyday experience of the quality of their judgments. Psychologists who work with patients have many hunches during each therapy session, anticipating how the patient will respond to an intervention, guessing what will happen next. Many of these hunches are confirmed, illustrating the reality of clinical skill.
The problem is that the correct judgments involve short-term predictions in the context of the therapeutic interview, a skill in which therapists may have years of practice. The tasks at which they fail typically require long-term predictions about the patient’s future. These are much more difficult, even the best formulas do only modestly well, and they are also tasks that the clinicians have never had the opportunity to learn properly—they would have to wait years for feedback, instead of receiving the instantaneous feedback of the clinical session. However, the line between what clinicians can do well and what they cannot do at all well is not obvious, and certainly not obvious to them. They know they are skilled, but they don’t necessarily know the boundaries of their skill. Not surprisingly, then, the idea that a mechanical combination of a few variables could outperform the subtle complexity of human judgment strikes experienced clinicians as obviously wrong.
The debate about the virtues of clinical and statistical prediction has always had a moral dimension. The statistical method, Meehl wrote, was criticized by experienced clinicians as “mechanical, atomistic, additive, cut and dried, artificial, unreal, arbitrary, incomplete, dead, pedantic, fractionated, trivial, forced, static, superficial, rigid, sterile, academic, pseudoscientific and blind.” The clinical method, on the other hand, was lauded by its proponents as “dynamic, global, meaningful, holistic, subtle, sympathetic, configural, patterned, organized, rich, deep, genuine, sensitive, sophisticated, real, living, concrete, natural, true to life, and understanding.”
This is an attitude we can all recognize. When a human competes with a machine, whether it is John Henry a-hammerin’ on the mountain or the chess genius Garry Kasparov facing off against the computer Deep Blue, our sympathies lie with our fellow human. The aversion to algorithms making decisions that affect humans is rooted in the strong preference that many people have for the ormnatural over the synthetic or artificial. Asked whether they would rather eat an organic or a commercially grown apple, most people prefer the “all natural” one. Even after being informed that the two apples taste the same, have identical nutritional value, and are equally healthful, a majority still prefer the organic fruit. Even the producers of beer have found that they can increase sales by putting “All Natural” or “No Preservatives” on the label.
The deep resistance to the demystification of expertise is illustrated by the reaction of the European wine community to Ashenfelter’s formula for predicting the price of Bordeaux wines. Ashenfelter’s formula answered a prayer: one might thus have expected that wine lovers everywhere would be grateful to him for demonstrably improving their ability to identify the wines that later would be good. Not so. The response in French wine circles, wrote The New York Times, ranged “somewhere between violent and hysterical.” Ashenfelter reports that one oenophile called his findings “ludicrous and absurd.” Another scoffed, “It is like judging movies without actually seeing them.”
The prejudice against algorithms is magnified when the decisions are consequential. Meehl remarked, “I do not quite know how to alleviate the horror some clinicians seem to experience when they envisage a treatable case being denied treatment because a ‘blind, mechanical’ equation misclassifies him.” In contrast, Meehl and other proponents of algorithms have argued strongly that it is unethical to rely on intuitive judgments for important decisions if an algorithm is available that will make fewer mistakes. Their rational argument is compelling, but it runs against a stubborn psychological reality: for most people, the cause of a mistake matters. The story of a child dying because an algorithm made a mistake is more poignant than the story of the same tragedy occurring as a resu
lt of human error, and the difference in emotional intensity is readily translated into a moral preference.
Fortunately, the hostility to algorithms will probably soften as their role in everyday life continues to expand. Looking for books or music we might enjoy, we appreciate recommendations generated by soft ware. We take it for granted that decisions about credit limits are made without the direct intervention of any human judgment. We are increasingly exposed to guidelines that have the form of simple algorithms, such as the ratio of good and bad cholesterol levels we should strive to attain. The public is now well aware that formulas may do better than humans in some critical decisions in the world of sports: how much a professional team should pay for particular rookie players, or when to punt on fourth down. The expanding list of tasks that are assigned to algorithms should eventually reduce the discomfort that most people feel when they first encounter the pattern of results that Meehl described in his disturbing little book.
Learning from Meehl
In 1955, as a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant in the Israeli Defense Forces, I was assigned to set up an interview system for the entire army. If you wonder why such a responsibility would be forced upon someone so young, bear in mind that the state of Israel itself was only seven years old at the time; all its institutions were under construction, and someone had to build them. Odd as it sounds today, my bachelor’s degree in psychology probably qualified me as the best-trained psychologist in the army. My direct supervisor, a brilliant researcher, had a degree in chemistry.
An idilnterview routine was already in place when I was given my mission. Every soldier drafted into the army completed a battery of psychometric tests, and each man considered for combat duty was interviewed for an assessment of personality. The goal was to assign the recruit a score of general fitness for combat and to find the best match of his personality among various branches: infantry, artillery, armor, and so on. The interviewers were themselves young draftees, selected for this assignment by virtue of their high intelligence and interest in dealing with people. Most were women, who were at the time exempt from combat duty. Trained for a few weeks in how to conduct a fifteen- to twenty-minute interview, they were encouraged to cover a range of topics and to form a general impression of how well the recruit would do in the army.
Unfortunately, follow-up evaluations had already indicated that this interview procedure was almost useless for predicting the future success of recruits. I was instructed to design an interview that would be more useful but would not take more time. I was also told to try out the new interview and to evaluate its accuracy. From the perspective of a serious professional, I was no more qualified for the task than I was to build a bridge across the Amazon.
Fortunately, I had read Paul Meehl’s “little book,” which had appeared just a year earlier. I was convinced by his argument that simple, statistical rules are superior to intuitive “clinical” judgments. I concluded that the then current interview had failed at least in part because it allowed the interviewers to do what they found most interesting, which was to learn about the dynamics of the interviewee’s mental life. Instead, we should use the limited time at our disposal to obtain as much specific information as possible about the interviewee’s life in his normal environment. Another lesson I learned from Meehl was that we should abandon the procedure in which the interviewers’ global evaluations of the recruit determined the final decision. Meehl’s book suggested that such evaluations should not be trusted and that statistical summaries of separately evaluated attributes would achieve higher validity.
I decided on a procedure in which the interviewers would evaluate several relevant personality traits and score each separately. The final score of fitness for combat duty would be computed according to a standard formula, with no further input from the interviewers. I made up a list of six characteristics that appeared relevant to performance in a combat unit, including “responsibility,” “sociability,” and “masculine pride.” I then composed, for each trait, a series of factual questions about the individual’s life before his enlistment, including the number of different jobs he had held, how regular and punctual he had been in his work or studies, the frequency of his interactions with friends, and his interest and participation in sports, among others. The idea was to evaluate as objectively as possible how well the recruit had done on each dimension.
By focusing on standardized, factual questions, I hoped to combat the halo effect, where favorable first impressions influence later judgments. As a further precaution against halos, I instructed the interviewers to go through the six traits in a fixed sequence, rating each trait on a five-point scale before going on to the next. And that was that. I informed the interviewers that they need not concern themselves with the recruit’s future adjustment to the military. Their only task was to elicit relevant facts about his past and to use that information to score each personality dimension. “Your function is to provide reliable measurements,” I told them. “Leave the predicok tive validity to me,” by which I meant the formula that I was going to devise to combine their specific ratings.
The interviewers came close to mutiny. These bright young people were displeased to be ordered, by someone hardly older than themselves, to switch off their intuition and focus entirely on boring factual questions. One of them complained, “You are turning us into robots!” So I compromised. “Carry out the interview exactly as instructed,” I told them, “and when you are done, have your wish: close your eyes, try to imagine the recruit as a soldier, and assign him a score on a scale of 1 to 5.”
Several hundred interviews were conducted by this new method, and a few months later we collected evaluations of the soldiers’ performance from the commanding officers of the units to which they had been assigned. The results made us happy. As Meehl’s book had suggested, the new interview procedure was a substantial improvement over the old one. The sum of our six ratings predicted soldiers’ performance much more accurately than the global evaluations of the previous interviewing method, although far from perfectly. We had progressed from “completely useless” to “moderately useful.”
The big surprise to me was that the intuitive judgment that the interviewers summoned up in the “close your eyes” exercise also did very well, indeed just as well as the sum of the six specific ratings. I learned from this finding a lesson that I have never forgotten: intuition adds value even in the justly derided selection interview, but only after a disciplined collection of objective information and disciplined scoring of separate traits. I set a formula that gave the “close your eyes” evaluation the same weight as the sum of the six trait ratings. A more general lesson that I learned from this episode was do not simply trust intuitive judgment—your own or that of others—but do not dismiss it, either.
Some forty-five years later, after I won a Nobel Prize in economics, I was for a short time a minor celebrity in Israel. On one of my visits, someone had the idea of escorting me around my old army base, which still housed the unit that interviews new recruits. I was introduced to the commanding officer of the Psychological Unit, and she described their current interviewing practices, which had not changed much from the system I had designed; there was, it turned out, a considerable amount of research indicating that the interviews still worked well. As she came to the end of her description of how the interviews are conducted, the officer added, “And then we tell them, ‘Close your eyes.’”
Do It Yourself
The message of this chapter is readily applicable to tasks other than making manpower decisions for an army. Implementing interview procedures in the spirit of Meehl and Dawes requires relatively little effort but substantial discipline. Suppose that you need to hire a sales representative for your firm. If you are serious about hiring the best possible person for the job, this is what you should do. First, select a few traits that are prerequisites for success in this position (technical proficiency, engaging personality, reliability, and so on). Don’t overdo it—six dimensions
is a good number. The traits you choose should be as independent as possible from each other, and you should feel that you can assess them reliably by asking a few factual questions. Next, make a list of those questions for each trait and think about how you will score it, say on a 1–5 scale. You should have an idea of what you will caleigl “very weak” or “very strong.”
These preparations should take you half an hour or so, a small investment that can make a significant difference in the quality of the people you hire. To avoid halo effects, you must collect the information on one trait at a time, scoring each before you move on to the next one. Do not skip around. To evaluate each candidate, add up the six scores. Because you are in charge of the final decision, you should not do a “close your eyes.” Firmly resolve that you will hire the candidate whose final score is the highest, even if there is another one whom you like better—try to resist your wish to invent broken legs to change the ranking. A vast amount of research offers a promise: you are much more likely to find the best candidate if you use this procedure than if you do what people normally do in such situations, which is to go into the interview unprepared and to make choices by an overall intuitive judgment such as “I looked into his eyes and liked what I saw.”
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