Who is susceptible? Everyone is susceptible because we are wired for survival. A noise in the brush might be nothing or a predator. Fear causes us to miss opportunities and arrogance exposes us to risk.
Awareness of leading cognitive biases helps our decision-making.
Recency bias (what have you done for me lately?). We remember fresh events more vividly. A bad performance could reflect skill, luck, or mean reversion. Fighter pilots in training are more likely to have a mediocre session after an excellent one. When a reserve player has a big game, she (and her family) may expect a bigger role or more minutes.
Attribution bias (it didn't happen the way you saw it happen). When we are successful, we take more credit than we take responsibility for poor performance. We deflect blame to officials, personnel (not enough talent) conditions, and bad luck. It's hard to see the man in the mirror clearly. Coaches may lower expectations seeking job security.
Framing (structuring the argument). We're faced with life-saving surgery. The surgeon can emphasize an eighty percent success rate or a twenty-percent death rate. She' saying the same thing, but our perception varies with the structure. The coach informs players that she wants fundamentally sound passing or tells them that behind-the-back, fancy Dan stuff lands you on the bench.
Sample size. If nothing goes wrong, is everything all right? Swimming with sharks is dangerous. There's a statistical rule of thumb equalling 3/n. If you do something dangerous five times without a bad outcome, the "p value" is about 3/5 = 0.6 (not significant). If you do it 100 times, then it's 3/100 = 0.03 (significant is < 0.05). Be wary of making quick judgments on limited data.
Confirmation bias. We suffer confirmation bias when we only read or study information that we already believe. Regular watchers of MSNBC or Fox news are fed information that appeals to their preferences and get reinforcement of existing beliefs. When we consume nothing but information about analytics, that heightens our statistical awareness. If we rely solely on the 'eye test' we can miss valuable information that factors into our decisions. One baseball writer constantly praised Jacoby Ellsbury, lamenting his trade to the Yankees...even after the trade was proven disastrous.
Warren Buffett sidekick Charlie Munger adopts German mathematician Carl Jacobi's advice, "Invert, always, invert." Think about what the opposite approach means.
Lagniappe: Do we make decisions based on the odds or on something else?
"When Red Auerbach, long time coach of the Boston Celtics, heard about Gilovich’s "hot hand" study he responded, "so he made a study… I couldn’t care less."The short answer is that coaches and managers are like all of us: they only look for what confirms their intuitions and ignore what contradictions their intuitions, what psychologists call confirmation bias...We automatically see the world as we want to, not how it is.
The odds are about 50-50 that you like licorice. But they're 100% that I won't waste time trying to convince you to like it.
Lagniappe 2. Multiple actions from ballside and helpside on a BOB.
