about this if we heard it from a much different source?” We can take this process of vetting information in the group further, initially and intentionally omitting where or whom we heard the idea from. Leading off our story by identifying the messenger could interfere with the group’s commitment to universalism, biasing them to agree with or discredit the message depending on their opinion of the messenger. So leave the source out to start, giving the group the maximum opportunity to form an impression without shooting (or celebrating) the message based on their opinion of the messenger (separate from the expertise and credibility of the messenger).
John Stuart Mill made it clear that the only way to gain knowledge and approach truth is by examining every variety of opinion. We learn things we didn’t know. We calibrate better. Even when the result of that examination confirms our initial position, we understand that position better if we open ourselves to every side of the issue. That requires open-mindedness to the messages that come from places we don’t like.
Disinterestedness: we all have a conflict of
interest, and it’s contagious
Back in the 1960s, the scientific community was at odds about whether sugar or fat was the culprit in the increasing rates of heart disease. In 1967, three Harvard scientists conducted a comprehensive review of the research to date, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, that firmly pointed the finger at fat as the culprit. The paper was, not surprisingly, influential in the debate on diet and heart disease. After all, the NEJM is and was a prestigious publication and the researchers were, all three, from Harvard. Blaming fat and exonerating sugar affected the diets of hundreds of millions of people for decades, a belief that caused a shift in eating habits that has been linked to the massive increase in obesity rates and diabetes.
The influence of this paper and its negative effects on America’s eating habits and health provides a stunning demonstration of the imperative of disinterestedness. It was recently discovered that a trade group representing the sugar industry had paid the three Harvard scientists to write the paper,
according to an article published in JAMA Internal Medicine in September 2016. Not surprisingly, consistent with the agenda of the sugar industry that had paid them, the researchers attacked the methodology of studies finding a link between sugar and heart disease and defended studies finding no link.
The scientists’ attacks on and defenses of the methodology of studies on fat and heart disease followed the same pro-sugar pattern.
The scientists involved are all dead. Were they alive, it’s possible, if we could ask them, that they may not have even consciously known they were being influenced. Given human nature, they likely, at least, would have defended the truth of what they wrote and denied that the sugar industry dictated or influenced their thinking on the subject. Regardless, had the conflict of interest been disclosed, the scientific community would have viewed their conclusions with much more skepticism, taking into account the possibility of bias due to the researchers’ financial interest. At the time, the NEJM did not require such disclosures. (That policy changed in 1984.) That omission prevented an accurate assessment of the findings, resulting in serious harm to the health of the nation.
We tend to think about conflicts of interest in the financial sense, like the researchers getting paid by the sugar industry. But conflicts of interest come in many flavors. Our brains have built-in conflicts of interest, interpreting the world around us to confirm our beliefs, to avoid having to admit ignorance or error, to take credit for good results following our decisions, to find reasons bad results following our decisions were due to factors outside our control, to compare well with our peers, and to live in a world where the way things turn out makes sense. We are not naturally disinterested. We don’t process information independent of the way we wish the world to be.
Remember the thought experiment I suggested at the beginning of the book about what the headlines would have looked like if Pete Carroll’s pass call had won the 2015 Super Bowl? Those headlines would have been about his brilliance. People would have analyzed Carroll’s decision differently.
Knowing how something turned out creates a conflict of interest that expresses itself as resulting.
Richard Feynman recognized that in physics—a branch of science that most of us consider as objective as 2 + 2 = 4—there is still demonstrable outcome bias. He found that if those analyzing data knew, or could even
just intuit, the hypothesis being tested, the analysis would be more likely to support the hypothesis being tested. The measurements might be objective, but slicing and dicing the data is vulnerable to bias, even unconsciously.
According to Robert MacCoun and physics Nobel laureate Saul Perlmutter in a 2015 Nature article, outcome-blind analysis has spread to several areas of particle physics and cosmology, where it “is often considered the only way to trust many results.” Because the idea—introducing a random variable so that those analyzing the data could not surmise the outcome the researcher might be hoping for—is hardly known in biological, psychological, and social sciences, the authors concluded these methods “might improve trust and integrity in many sciences, including those with high-stakes analyses that are easily plagued by bias.” Outcome blindness enforces disinterestedness.
We can apply this idea of outcome blindness to the way we communicate information as we workshop decisions about our far more ambiguous pursuits—like describing a poker hand, or a family argument, or the results of a market test for a new product. If the group is going to help us make and evaluate decisions in an unbiased way, we don’t want to infect them in the way the data analysts were infected if they could surmise the hypothesis being tested. Telling someone how a story ends encourages them to be resulters, to interpret the details to fit that outcome. If I won a hand, it was more likely my group would assess my strategy as good. If I lost, the reverse would be true. Win a case at trial, the strategy is brilliant. Lose, and mistakes were made. We treat outcomes as good signals for decision quality, as if we were playing chess. If the outcome is known, it will bias the assessment of the decision quality to align with the outcome quality.
If the group is blind to the outcome, it produces higher fidelity evaluation of decision quality. The best way to do this is to deconstruct decisions before an outcome is known. Attorneys can evaluate trial strategy before the verdict comes in. Sales teams can evaluate strategy before learning whether they’ve closed the sale. Traders can vet process prior to positions being established or prior to options expiring. After the outcome, make it a habit when seeking advice to give the details without revealing the outcome. In poker, it isn’t practical to analyze hands before knowing how they turn out since the results come within seconds of the decisions. To
address this, many expert poker players often omit the outcome when seeking advice about their play.
This became such a natural habit that I didn’t realize, until I started conducting poker seminars for players newer to the game, that this was not the norm for everyone. When I used hands I had played as illustrations, I would describe the hand up to the decision point I was discussing and no further, leaving off how the hand ended. This was, after all, how I had been trained by my poker group. When we finished the discussion, it was jarring to watch a roomful of people look at me like I had left them teetering on the
edge of a cliff.
“Wait! How did the hand turn out?”
I gave them the red pill: “It doesn’t matter.”
Of course, we don’t have to be describing a poker hand to use this strategy to promote disinterestedness. Anyone can provide the narrative only up to the point of the decision under consideration, leaving off the outcome so as not to infect their listeners with bias. And outcomes aren’t the only problem. Beliefs are also contagious. If our listeners know what we believe to be true, they will likely work pretty hard to justify our beliefs, often without even knowing they are doing it. They will develop an ideological conflict of interest created by our informing our listeners of our beliefs. So when trying to vet some piece of information, some fact or opinion, we would do well to shield our listeners from what our opinion is as we seek the group’s opinion.
Simply put, the group is less likely to succumb to ideological conflicts of interest when they don’t know what the interest is. That’s MacCoun and Perlmutter’s point.
Another way a group can de-bias members is to reward them for skill in debating opposing points of view and finding merit in opposing positions. When members of the group disagree, a debate may be of only marginal value because the people debating are biased toward confirming their position, often creating stalemate. If two people disagree, a referee can get them to each argue the other’s position with the goal of being the best debater. This acts to shift the interest to open-mindedness to the opposing opinion rather than confirmation of their original position. They can’t win the debate if they can’t forcefully and credibly argue the other side. The key is for the group to have a charter that rewards objective consideration of