The Maleficent 7

The Magnificent Seven is a terrific 1960 movie “western” about seven gunfighters hired to protect a small Mexican village from marauding bandits. A re-make is currently in the works and the “original is itself a re-make of Akira Kurosawa’s Japanese classic, Seven Samurai. Meanwhile, Maleficent is the “Mistress of All Evil” in Sleeping Beauty who curses the infant princess to prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die before the sun sets on her sixteenth birthday. Today I’m offering up a mash-up from these movies to outline what I’m calling the Maleficent 7 – seven inherent human problems and limitations that impede our ability to make good decisions generally and especially about money.

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Sheldon Cooper Illustrates Bias Blindness

“Don’t you think if I were wrong I’d know it?”

Further suggested reading:

• Bias Blindness
• Bias Blindness Explained
• Bias Blindness and Political Polarization
• Laugh or Cry?

Bias Blindness Explained

Earlier today, I posted the following on Twitter, whereby I offered a 140 character explanation of bias blindness.

Bias blindness explained: I readily concede that I undoubtedly hold many views that are wrong. The problem is in providing current examples.

— Bob Seawright (@RPSeawright) December 9, 2014

Jason Zweig, the wonderful columnist for The Wall Street Journal, added the following (and I agreed).

.@RPSeawright and by admitting that you're prone to bias-blindness, you implicitly pat yourself on the back for being less prone than avg.

— Jason Zweig (@jasonzweigwsj) December 9, 2014

As Jason explained via email, “conscious control of unconscious bias is impossible…on an ad-hoc basis.”  Our best hope, we agree, is by instituting careful, blanket policies and procedures to combat them.

As Daniel Kahneman also argues, organizations are more likely to succeed at overcoming bias than individuals. That’s partly on account of resources, and partly because self-criticism is so difficult. As I have argued repeatedly, perhaps the best check on bad decision-making we have is when someone (or, when possible, an empowered team) we respect sets out to show us where and how we are wrong. Within an organization that means making sure that everyone can be challenged without fear of reprisal and that everyone (and especially anyone in charge) can be and is held accountable.

But that doesn’t happen very often. Kahneman routinely asks groups how committed they are to better decision-making and if they are willing to spend even one percent of their budgets on doing so. Sadly, as far as I know, he hasn’t had any takers yet. Smart companies and individuals will take him up on that challenge. Those that are smarter will do even more simply because there’s no substitute for good judgment.

What you’re vacillatin’ between

Francis Paschal

When I was a first-year law student at Duke many years ago, my Civil Procedure professor was the delightfully named J. Francis Paschal. Professor Paschal seemed to like to portray himself as a bit of a good ol’ boy, with a protruding gut, truly dreadful sports jackets, hair slicked and parted just off-center, and a drawl as thick as molasses on a cold day (if not nearly so sweet). That image could not mask a keen mind and a sharp wit. Nor did it hide his erudition — in addition to his credentials in the law, Professor Paschal had a Princeton Ph.D. too.

The good professor led his classes using the Socratic conventions of the day. A student was called upon to answer a series of penetrating and perplexing questions supposedly designed to ferret out the nuances of some legal principle or another but which, in reality, served to demonstrate to a class full of bright and full-of-themselves college graduates that they were out of the minors and into the intellectual big leagues. If we were going to compete at that level, we needed to up our collective game considerably.

One day fairly early in the first semester Professor Paschal called on a woman in the row ahead of me (who I shall kindly refer to — using a pseudonym since she is now a Deputy Attorney General — as “Frieda Clancy”) and asked a typically impossible question. SInce Frieda was a friend, I happened to know that her extremely difficult predicament was actually utterly impossible because she was not prepared for class.  In fact, it wasn’t just that she wasn’t fully prepared (meaning that she had read the required case, all the cases cited therein, the case comments, casebook notes and citations, relevent hornbook and law review materials and anything else we could think of that might be relevant). She wasn’t prepared at all. She hadn’t even read the case at issue.

This was not likely to turn out well.

Myopinion

Noah Smith (@Noahpinion on Twitter) made an interesting assertion yesterday about the purpose of argument. Smith began by noting Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff’s op-ed in Forbes in which he acts as a concern troll toward New York Times columnist (and noted economist himself) Paul Krugman because Krugman allegedly called Congressman Paul Ryan stupid. To be clear, Krugman’s primary point was not that Ryan is stupid, but that he is crooked, especially as it pertains to his budget proposals. Smith uses this context for looking at arguments in general, and he makes an excellent point.

[A]s a society, we use arguments the wrong way. We tend to treat arguments like debate competitions — two people argue in front of a crowd, and whoever wins gets the love and adoration of the crowd, and whoever loses goes home defeated and shamed. I guess that’s better than seeing arguments as threats of physical violence, but I still prefer the idea of arguing as a way to learn, to bounce ideas off of other people. Proving you’re smart is a pointless endeavor (unless you’re looking for a job), and is an example of what Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck calls a “fixed mindset.” As the band Sparks once sang, “Everybody’s stupid — that’s for sure” [even though nobody wants to be called stupid]. What matters is going in the right direction — becoming less stupid, little by little.

But I think Smith’s ideal isn’t all that practical. To begin with, as Megan McArdle emphasizes, by calling one who disagrees with you stupid (even implicitly) “you have guaranteed that no one who disagrees with you will hear a word that you are saying.” Thus “calling people stupid is simply a performance for the fellow travelers in your audience” as well as a means of asserting superiority.

My sense is that the key element to this discussion is that most partisans see “their side” as not just true, but obviously true. It’s a by-product of bias blindness, or selective perception.  We tend to see bias in others but not in ourselves. Therefore, our strongly held positions aren’t really debatable — they’re objectively and obviously true. After all, if we didn’t think our positions were true, we wouldn’t hold them. And (our thinking goes) since they are objectively true, anyone who makes the effort to try should be able to ascertain that truth. Our opponents are thus without excuse. 

Laugh or Cry?

Our biases make it really hard to see things clearly.

Ezra Klein (formerly of The Washington Post) has a new venture (Vox) dedicated to what he calls “explanatory journalism” and which offers consistently progressive “explanations” for various policies by a talented but ideologically pure staff. Klein’s big introductory think piece cites research (already familiar to regular readers here) showing that people understand the world in ways that suit their preexisting beliefs and ideological commitments. Thus in controlled experiments both conservatives and liberals systematically misread the facts in a way that confirms their biases.

Interestingly, if unsurprisingly, while Klein concedes the universality of the problem in theory, all of his examples point out the biased stupidity of his political opponents. Paul Krugman – a terrific economist but an often insufferable progressive shill – sees Klein’s bid and ups the ante, exhibiting classic bias blindness: “the lived experience is that this effect is not, in fact, symmetric between liberals and conservatives.” In other words, his “lived experience” trumps the research evidence (science at work!). In Krugman’s view, conservatives are simply much stupider than liberals because reality skews liberal. He even goes so far as to deny that there are examples where liberals engage in the “overwhelming rejection of something that shouldn’t even be in dispute.” If what is being expressed is perceived to be the unvarnished truth, bias can’t be part of the equation.

Yale’s Dan Kahan, who was Klein’s primary interviewee in the referenced piece and an author of much of the relevant research, found Krugman’s view “amazingly funny,” in part because the research is so clear. Biased reasoning is in fact ideologically symmetrical.

We Was Robbed

On June 21, 1932, after Max Schmeling lost his heavyweight boxing title to Jack Sharkey on a controversial split-decision, his manager Joe Jacobs famously intoned, “We was robbed.” It’s a conviction that hits home with every fan of a losing team and thus every sports fan a lot of the time. It’s also a point of view that has received a surprising amount of academic interest and study (note, for example, this famous 1954 paper arising out of a Dartmouth v. Princeton football game).

Traditional economic theory insists that we humans are rational actors making rational decisions amidst uncertainty in order to maximize our marginal utility. As if. We are remarkably crazy a lot of the time.

What’s Your Baseline?

I spoke at an excellent conference recently and was on a panel there with two big-time economists.  While I was sitting on the dias listening to my “colleagues,” I couldn’t help thinking about this old gem from Sesame Street.

And I was the “thing” that didn’t belong. 

That said, I was a bit surprised that we had so many areas of substantial agreement because our starting points were pretty different.  Economists look at the investment world somewhat differently from the rest of us.  They come at things from a different place.  Plus, neither of them was American, making our outlooks even less inherently consistent.

Bias Blindness

Try this experiment sometime. Ask an impartial observer – someone with no connection to any of the players – to go with you to a youth sporting event involving one of your children or grandchildren. Try to behave as you normally would but also watch and listen carefully, particularly to the conversations, attitudes and actions of the parents.

Then go to a game involving no kids or families you know with the same companion. Both of you should again try to be as observant as possible throughout, particularly with respect to the conversations, attitudes and actions of the parents.

After both games are over, discuss what you experienced with the observer — second game first. But read no further until after both games are over, nerves are calmed, tempers cooled and the games discussed. Ask the observer to read this entire entry before the first game and to direct your post-game analysis and conversation accordingly.

Confirmation Bias Writ Large

Tomorrow evening Duke and North Carolina will renew the best rivalry in sports via a basketball game on the Duke campus (ESPN, 9pm ET).  As a freshman, Jay Bilas (now of ESPN) lined up for a foul shot in his first rivalry game next to then All-American and future NBA All-Star Brad Daugherty (and also a current ESPN-er), who looked over at him and said “I’m going to beat you like a rented mule.”  That comment was astonishingly mild as these things go.

I first sat in Cameron Indoor Stadium as a student in 1978 and didn’t miss a home basketball game while I was enrolled at Duke.  Every game was special – and wild.  NBC came to Cameron to do the first national telecast from the arena on January 28, 1979 for a game against Marquette (I was there, of course) and insisted on a time-delay so the crowd could be censored if necessary. But Duke v. Carolina was and is something else entirely.