Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
One outcome tells us nothing
The gravity well
Flip a coin after someone calls heads. If it lands heads, the call looks brilliant, and if it lands tails, it looks dumb, though the call itself was identical either way. Real decisions get the same treatment. Imagine a coach's pass on the final play of a Super Bowl ending in a touchdown catch instead of an interception: the identical call now feels brilliant. The result acts like a gravity well, and it is hard to climb out of it to look at the process.
Writing odds first
The way forward is to ignore the outcome as much as possible and judge the decision without it. That is far easier before the outcome exists. Writing down the possible outcomes in advance, giving each a probability, and noting the payoffs leaves something to point at when the unlikely result lands: the scenario was on the page, it carried a 1 percent chance, and it is no reason to overreact. A trial lawyer can do the same with a trial strategy before the verdict arrives.
Reviewing wins
Wins deserve the same review as losses. Either result is a prompt to look at decision quality, and the review works best with the outcome left out of the room. Phil Ivey, one of the best players in history, won a huge tournament against an all-star final table and then spent a whole dinner talking about the mistakes he had made.
Why does knowing the outcome change our judgment?
Psychologist Baruch Fischhoff ran studies in 1975 in which people were told how a historical event turned out and then asked what they would have predicted. Those who knew the outcome rated it as far more likely than people who did not, and they were unaware their answers had shifted. The effect is called hindsight bias. It makes the result seem to have been predictable all along, which makes the decision behind it seem clearly good or clearly bad.
How has research tested judging by results?
In a 1988 study, Jonathan Baron and John Hershey gave people descriptions of decisions, such as a doctor choosing a risky surgery, and then varied only whether the outcome was good or bad. The same decision was rated as worse, and the decision maker as less competent, when the outcome was bad. Participants judged the identical choice differently even though they knew the odds had been the same. Baron and Hershey called the pattern outcome bias.
More from Talks at Google
