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Reasoning to be right loses bets
Right versus accurate
Reasoning to be right means reasoning to prove priors: the goal is for existing beliefs to come out correct. Reasoning to be accurate means trying to build the most accurate model of objective truth. A bet forces the second mode, because anyone about to put something at stake gets careful about the odds.
Three ingredients
A group built around accuracy needs three things: a commitment to accuracy, accountability to each other for keeping it, and openness to diverse viewpoints. The last one follows from the first, since being accurate can mean accepting that things aren't the way you want them to be.
Rewards teach
Rewards do the training. A group that responds warmly to a member who reports a possible mistake, and coolly to a member who reports being unlucky, teaches everyone to hunt for mistakes. A player sitting alone at the table, knowing a conversation with that group is coming, starts processing hands differently: looking for errors, looking for questions, looking for opponents who may simply be better.
Does being held accountable improve reasoning?
Psychologists Jennifer Lerner and Philip Tetlock reviewed the research in a 1999 paper in Psychological Bulletin. They found that accountability improved reasoning mainly when people knew their audience valued accuracy and did not know its views in advance. Under those conditions people thought more carefully and considered more evidence. When the audience's views were known, people tended to shift toward them instead. The review separated the effects into what they called exploratory and confirmatory thought.
Is reasoning better in groups than alone?
Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argued in a 2011 paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences that human reasoning evolved to produce and evaluate arguments in groups. People alone tend to reason in favor of conclusions they already hold. In experiments on logic problems such as the Wason selection task, groups that disagree solve the problem far more often than individuals alone. The paper is known as the argumentative theory of reasoning.
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