Overcoming Bias

Insincere Cheers

As my son is a senior marching band drum major, Friday I went to a local high school football game to film him for posterity.  And I noticed something obvious.

People like to cheer their teams on, but prefer to be encouraged by announcers, cheerleaders, bands, pep squads, and so on.  And while fans seem to care that these various leaders of cheer are impressive and loyal, fans don't seem to care nearly as much if these leaders sound sincere.  The announcer carefully controlled his voice inflections, the cheerleaders carefully synchronized their arm movements, and everything they said was consistently loyal, but you couldn't possibly have mistaken them for people who deeply and sincerely believed the words they spoke.

Sport cheers are often considered an analogy to political and ideological partisanship; we like to vote and declare our opinions similar to the way we like to cheer sport teams.  We prefer to support positions that have have loyal impressive cheerleaders.  It is nice if those cheerleaders are also sincere, but it is not especially important to us.  It is, however, important that our idea cheerleaders be impressive and loyal.  We might eagerly point out when leaders on the other side sound insincere, but that is mostly hypocrisy, since we don't care much about our leaders' sincerity.   

Just as we care more that our team wins than that they were actually the strongest team, we probably care more that our idea sides look good than that our ideas are true.

Poker Vs Chess

A computer has beaten top human poker players:

Humanity was dealt a decisive blow by a poker-playing artificial intelligence program called Polaris during the Man-Machine Poker Competition in Las Vegas.  Poker champs fought the AI system to a draw, then won in the first two of four rounds (each round had Polaris playing 500 hands against two humans, whose points were averaged.) But in the final two rounds of the match, Polaris beat both human teams, two wins out of four, with one loss and one draw. IBM's Deep Blue beat chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997.

This has gained very little news coverage, in stark contrast to the Chess case, even though far more people play poker than chess.  To explain both facts, note that most people can more easily see that they lack chess than poker expertiSe.  They can watch a poker expert fold or raise and imagine that they would have done the same, but know they have no idea why a chess expert makes his moves.

This fools people into thinking they could be a poker champion, which is why so many more people try at poker.  And being less impressed by existing poker champions, people are less impressed by a computer who beats those champions.  The moral: beware of underestimating computers by underestimating the difficulty of the tasks at which they excel. 

More Referee Bias

Analyzing the neutrality of referees during 12 German premier league (1. Bundesliga) soccer seasons, this paper documents evidence that social forces influence agents' decisions. Referees, who are appointed to be impartial, tend to favor the home team by systematically awarding more stoppage time in close matches in which the home team is behind. They also favor the home team in decisions to award goals and penalty kicks. Crowd composition affects the size and the direction of the bias, and the crowd's proximity to the field is related to the quality of refereeing.

That is from Economic Inquiry. 

Don't Do Something

The October Journal of Economic Psychology says goalies do too much:

In soccer penalty kicks, goalkeepers choose their action before they can clearly observe the kick direction. An analysis of 286 penalty kicks in top leagues and championships worldwide shows that given the probability distribution of kick direction, the optimal strategy for goalkeepers is to stay in the goal's center. Goalkeepers, however, almost always jump right or left. ... The claim that jumping is the norm is supported by a second study, a survey conducted with 32 top professional goalkeepers. The seemingly biased decision making is particularly striking since the goalkeepers have huge incentives to make correct decisions, and it is a decision they encounter frequently. Finally, we discuss several implications of the action/omission bias for economics and management. ...

The action/omission bias might affect the decision of investors whether to change their portfolio (action) or not (inaction). It can affect the choice of managers whether to leave their company's strategy or investments unchanged (inaction), or to change them (action). The bias may also have implications for the decision of workers whether to stay in their job (inaction) or look for a better job (action), and one's decision whether to re-locate to another city or not. In the macro-economic level, the action/omission bias may also affect decisions made by governments and central banks whether to change various policy variables (interest rates, tax rates, various types of expenditures, etc.), or leave them unchanged.

Of course if you do nothing you risk being seen as cowardly or ignorant, so it might not pay you to correct this bias.   

Why I'm Betting on the Red Sox

One of the most pervasive beliefs among sports fans is a belief in "streaks".  I cannot tell you the number of times I have heard sports commentators this week tell us that the Rockies have won 21 of their last 22 games.  And this alone is the reason that I'm betting against the Rockies.

The "hot hand bias" was first documented in a fascinating paper by Tom Gilovich, Robert Vallone and Amos Tversky.  That original paper (available here) is a wonderful read, showing that the widespread belief among basketball fans of a strong "hot hand" is simply false.  That is, today's streak doesn't predict tomorrow's behavior.  I love teaching this paper to my MBA students, simply because they don't believe it.  The hot hand fallacy is a wake-up to how pervasive bias can be.  A nice example of how sports can yield very convincing teaching metaphors.

A subsequent literature has developed showing that many (most?) of the sports statistics that ESPN loves to share with us, are simply useless as inputs for forecasting the future.  It seems that our brains are a bit too willing to try to find order, even in a world where chaos reigns.  This leads me to believe that most baseball fans are a bit too optimistic that the Rockies' streak will persist.

Some will protest that subsequent research has found evidence of streakiness in specific sports.  I agree.  But this is beside the point: it is essentially an observation about sports.  What is more relevant here (and no-one has convincingly refuted) is that sports fans tend to believe that streakiness is even stronger. 

Believe it or not, there is now an entire blog devoted to the hot hand and streakiness in sports - read more here.  Or if you are interested in the performance of streaky baseball teams in the post-season, read this analysis at hardballtimes.com.

(OK, there is one more reason I'm betting on the Red Sox: I went to graduate school in Beantown, and learned to love baseball at Fenway.)

Belief as Attire

I have so far distinguished between belief as anticipation-controller, belief in belief, professing and cheering.  Of these, we might call anticipation-controlling beliefs "proper beliefs" and the other forms "improper belief".  A proper belief can be wrong or irrational, e.g., someone who genuinely anticipates that prayer will cure her sick baby, but the other forms are arguably "not belief at all".

Yet another form of improper belief is belief as group-identification - as a way of belonging.  Robin Hanson uses the excellent metaphor of wearing unusual clothing, a group uniform like a priest's vestments or a Jewish skullcap, and so I will call this "belief as attire".

In terms of humanly realistic psychology, the Muslims who flew planes into the World Trade Center undoubtedly saw themselves as heroes defending truth, justice, and the Islamic Way from hideous alien monsters a la the movie Independence Day.  Only a very inexperienced nerd, the sort of nerd who has no idea how non-nerds see the world, would say this out loud in an Alabama bar.  It is not an American thing to say.  The American thing to say is that the terrorists "hate our freedom" and that flying a plane into a building is a "cowardly act".  You cannot say the phrases "heroic self-sacrifice" and "suicide bomber" in the same sentence, even for the sake of accurately describing how the Enemy sees the world.   The very concept of the courage and altruism of a suicide bomber is Enemy attire - you can tell, because the Enemy talks about it.  The cowardice and sociopathy of a suicide bomber is American attire.  There are no quote marks you can use to talk about how the Enemy sees the world; it would be like dressing up as a Nazi for Halloween.

Calibration in chess

Daniel Kahneman posted the following on the Judgment and Decision Making site:

Have there been studies of the calibration of expert players in judgments of chess situations -- e.g., probability that white will win?

In terms of the amount and quality experience and feedback, chess players are at least as privileged as weather forecasters and racetrack bettors -- but they don't have the experience of expressing their judgments in probabilities. I [Kahneman] am guessing that the distinction between a game that is "certainly lost" and "probably lost" is one that very good players can make reliably, but I know of no evidence.

Despite knowing much less about decision making and (likely) less about chess than Kahneman, I have three conjectures:

Winning at Rock-Paper-Scissors

Rock, Paper, Scissors is a simple game whose winner should be determined completely by luck. Yet here is a guide to winning at the game. (HT Andrew Sullivan.)

Against a rational player you should randomize and play Rock, Paper and Scissors each with 1/3 probability. If your opponent does this you can never come up with a strategy that will give you an advantage over him. But, as the guide says, “Humans, try as they might, are terrible at trying to be random, in fact often humans in trying to approximate randomness become quite predictable.” For example, according to the guide, an inexperienced player will never play the same thing three times in a row. Taking advantage of this, you can gain an edge over your opponent.

Race Bias of NBA Refs

On Wednesday the New York TImes covered OB contributor Justin Wolfers's paper showing:

White referees called fouls at a greater rate against black players than against white players.  ... [There is] a corresponding bias in which black officials called fouls more frequently against white players, though that tendency was not as strong.

The NBA says its own study refutes this, though they won't release their data to allow independent confirmation. 

Yes, Justin hasn't actually posted here yet, but we continue to hope.  :)

Explain Your Wins

From yet another good article by Shankar Vedantam:

Winners discount information about lucky breaks and chalk up their right calls to superior judgment, whereas losers tend to emphasize the role of bad luck -- rather than bad judgment -- when their predictions go wrong.

Thomas Gilovich ... said this is why a lot of water-cooler conversations among NCAA office-pool participants feature people explaining to others why their predictions went wrong. People don't talk very much about predictions that went right, Gilovich said, because they automatically chalk up those results to brilliant insight. Wrong calls, however, are invariably seen to be caused by fluke events -- which is why they need explaining. ...

When psychologists once asked sports fans to visualize how a particular team might win a game, the volunteers became far more likely to later believe that the team would win -- and to bet money on it. Essentially, psychologist Bryan Gibson of Central Michigan University said, focusing on some part of a conundrum makes it much more difficult for people to keep in mind how much they do not know about all the other variables involved. ...

Gibson has also found that gambling is one domain in which it may be wiser to have a pessimistic personality rather than an optimistic personality. Gamblers tend to be optimists in that they inherently believe good things are likely to happen to them. When a pessimist wins a bet, he is likely to walk away with his winnings because he can't believe that his lucky streak will continue. ... optimists were far more likely to throw good money after bad because they believed that, sooner or later, things would break their way

To do better:  focus more on explaining why you won, than on why you lost.