Discover more from Overcoming Bias
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.
Explain Your Wins
I don't want to take the comments into a tangential dialog. And, I apologize to anyone who thought my original comment was inappropriate or offensive.
I thought it was appropriate to point out that, while the bias described in the post is real and common, we also see examples of the reverse of the problem (denying responsiblity for successes rather than failure). My point was to caution against overcompensating for the original bias as a strategy, rather than to merely be aware of the phenomenon and look for the best explanations for all outcomes.
And, it seems to me that taking a single example as in indication that I'm the sort of person who takes every opportunity to bash religion, says much more about the reader's biases than mine.
1) I wonder if hindsight bias plays a role in the asymetric explanations. Ex post, events tend to be more obvious than they were ex ante. If I assume that I am smart, then if I get something right, it is probably because I saw or intuited the obvious outcome. If I got something wrong when it seems to have been obvious, it must have been because I was unlucky.
2) On your gambling optimists and pessimists point, if you are correct, that would suggest that gambling pessimists should have greater skewness preference than gambling optimists. Otherwise, why would a pessimist ever gamble?