about strategy all day long. I just don’t think there’s much purpose in a poker story if the point is about something you had no control over, like bad luck.”
When you think about a charter for truthseeking interactions, Erik Seidel pretty much nailed it. He told me the rules of being in a pod with him. He discouraged me from confirmatory or biased thought like “I got unlucky.” He encouraged me to find things I might have control over and how to improve decisions about those. I knew he would hold me accountable to these things in future interactions. We would explore diverse ideas because he insisted that be the focus of our interactions.
Because I was lucky enough to be part of a group with a truthseeking charter, there was no question that my poker decision-making improved.
When I could consult them on in-progress decisions, like whether to move up in stakes or bankroll management or game selection, their advice reduced the number of errors I was making. Likewise, access to their range of strategies and experiences improved the quality of my thinking and decisions on a continuing basis. When I had questions or didn’t understand why something happened, they would see things I didn’t. When they had questions or needed advice on a hand, I wasn’t just helping them work through a decision they made but would often get insights into my own game. Those interactions led to improvements in my game I would have overlooked or, at best, figured out on my own only after making a lot of costly errors.
Even better, interacting with similarly motivated people improves the ability to combat bias not just during direct interactions but when we are making and analyzing decisions on our own. The group gets into our head —in a good way—reshaping our decision habits.
The group rewards focus on accuracy
We all want to be thought well of, especially by people we respect. Lerner and Tetlock recognized that our craving for approval is incredibly strong and incentivizing. In most laboratory situations, they noted, study participants expected to explain their actions to someone they’d never met
and never expected to meet again. “What is remarkable about this literature is that—despite the prevalence of these minimalist manipulations— participants still reliably respond as if audience approval matters.” It’s great to get approval from people we respect, but we crave approval so badly, we’ll still work to get it from a stranger. A productive decision group can harness this desire by rewarding accuracy and intellectual honesty with social approval.
Motivated reasoning and self-serving bias are two habits of mind that are deeply rooted in how our brains work. We have a huge investment in confirmatory thought, and we fall into these biases all the time without even knowing it. Confirmatory thought is hard to spot, hard to change, and, if we do try changing it, hard to self-reinforce. It is one thing to commit to rewarding ourselves for thinking in bets, but it is a lot easier if we get others to do the work of rewarding us.
Groups like AA demonstrate how a supportive group can provide the reward for doing the hard work of changing a habit routine, just by its approval. For engaging in the difficult work involved in sobriety, local AA groups give tokens or chips celebrating the length of individual members’ sobriety. The tokens (which members often carry or customize as jewelry) are a tangible reminder that others acknowledge you are accomplishing something difficult. There are chips for marking one to sixty-five years of sobriety. There are also chips given for every month of sobriety in the first year. There is even a chip given for being sober for twenty-four hours.
I experienced firsthand the power of a group’s approval to reshape individual thinking habits. I got my fix by trying to be the best credit-giver, the best mistake-admitter, and the best finder-of-mistakes-in-good- outcomes. The reward was their enthusiastic engagement and deep dives introducing me to the nuances of poker strategy. It was also rewarding to have these intelligent, successful players take my questions seriously and increasingly ask for my opinions. In contrast, I felt disapproval from them when I acted against the charter and complained about my bad luck, or expected them to confirm how great I played simply because I was winning.
While I never got close to attaining the goal of a pure focus on accuracy, my group helped me to give a little more credit than I otherwise would have, to spot a few more mistakes than I would have spotted on my own, to be more open-minded to strategic choices that I disagreed with.