The Resulting Fallacy Is Ruining Your Decisions

[JSngry]

http://nautil.us/issue/55/trust/the-resulting-fallacy-is-ruining-your-decisions

Say I have a fair coin. I can tell you exactly what the probability of heads or tails on the next flip is. But I can’t tell you what the next flip will be. That’s what accepting outcomes is like. Accepting that you don’t know if the coin will land heads or tails on the next flip. That means that if you offer me a $2-to-$1 gambling proposition on this coin, I should be willing to do that. Even if I lose the next 10 flips, that doesn’t mean that I made a bad decision. And I should strive to be happy that I made a good decision and not focus on the result. It’s a mindset thing.

In life, it’s usually even more complicated because in most real decisions we haven’t examined the coin. We don’t know if it is a fair coin, if it has two sides with a heads and tails on it and is weighted properly. That’s the hidden information problem. We can’t see everything. We haven’t experienced everything. We know the facts that we know, but there may be facts that we don’t know. Then the job of the decider is to reduce the uncertainty as much as they possibly can, but to understand that they’re always working within a range and they have limited control over how things turn out on any given try.

[felser]

[JSngry]

Why are we all resulters?

Knowing the outcome infects us. We’re rational beings that think things are supposed to make sense. It’s very hard for us to wrap our heads around a bad outcome when we didn’t do anything wrong. Or that there’s a good outcome that’s just random. We’re really uncomfortable with randomness in that way. It’s just the way we’re built: to recognize patterns. Which can be bad for decision making in some ways, but is a good thing in others because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to recognize our mother’s face and then we’d be dead.

How do we stop being resulters?

If we know that outcomes infect us, we want to separate ourselves from outcomes as much as we possibly can when we’re thinking about decision quality. And we can really do that. Doesn’t matter to me whether you got in an accident or not—I should be able to ask you questions to decide whether your decision quality while you were driving was good, because there’s certain things that I do know go into a good decision about driving. You should be sort of trying to think about that for yourself, but also, don’t talk about the outcome when you’re asking other people about the quality of their decisions. This is something that really great poker players do. If I were to describe a hand to you that I had a question about, I would give a lot of detail. The kinds of details that I know you need to know. Then I’m going to tell you the decision point. But I may not tell you the decision I made, because that might infect you. And you can go out and do that in your own life.