Article archive / October 1, 2012
Originally published: . Volume 4, No. 2. Source pages: 2.
My husband and I stumbled across the 2011 movie Moneyball, a film about the Oakland Athletics and their general manager, Billy Beane.
Based on M. Lewis’ book, Moneyball is a true story about Beane’s efforts to get a leg up in the baseball market with his underdog budget of $14 million and heavyweight competitors like the New York Yankees, with their $125 million for attracting talent.
The backstory is that Beane himself had been predicted to be a shooting star in baseball but his athletic career never got off the ground.
The movie begins with Beane, disgusted with losses and hamstrung by his budget, hiring a Yale statistics geek. The two go on to put together an innovative selection program that includes evidence- based statistics and Beane’s talent for negotiation. They ferret out and hire these “undervalued” players and go on to build a winning team at bargain basement prices.
This innovation in predictive statistics caused a paradigm shift in the baseball industry.
Psychologists will recognize the group dynamics in the film. In one scene, a bunch of grizzled, tobacco-chewing, baseball gurus sit around a table and criticize the new approach. They have based their careers on metrics like batting averages and runs batted in. They see little value in the new metrics.
The gurus were in the unavoidable traps of social judgment: ignoring base-rates, being misled by compelling details, regression to the mean, groupthink, selective attention, and so on.
When problems are complex, when the issue in front of our nose clashes with our preexisting beliefs, when time separates our dots, when we are tired, and so on, we are prone to flawed judgment. Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman would probably tell us that our baseball gurus were influenced by “WYSIATI” – What You See Is All There Is.
I called DDS director Ms. Spurgeon several times to discuss her reason for sending a cautionary memo out to psych- ologists about Dr. Michael Chafetz’ work on malingering in Social Security exams (also predictive statistics). I never received a reply, not even a courtesy return call. I contacted the government public relations fellow (a very cordial gentleman) who said I’d receive an answer, he even checked back to see if I had. I never did. I submitted a request for documents. That has not worked either.
The SSA and the local DDS should open itself up to new scientific information, and let the chips fall where they fall. It is not their job to censure scientific findings. There are only a few scientists doing this important work, and Chafetz is one of them.
The most common human judgment error is overconfidence. Even when we are 98 percent sure that we are correct, we are only right 68 percent of the time.
Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, relates overconfidence to self- deception and writes, “It is systematic deformation of the truth at each stage of the psychological process. This is why psychology is both the study of information acquisition and analysis and also the study of its continual degradation and destruction.”
Are we in an age of overconfidence? Stanley Silverman, an IO psychologist, might say so. “Arrogance has run amok lately,” he writes in, “Arrogance: A Formula for Leadership Failure.” He points to a comment in Time Magazine that we are in an “age of arrogance.”
Silverman tells us that arrogance in leaders has a cost in decision- making. Arrogance promotes a “weak learning orientation” and leads people to “disregard potentially helpful feedback.”
There is always a chance that power will lead to overconfidence, arrogance, and bad decisions. In his 1887 letter to the Church of England historian Mandell Creighton, and in a statement as elegant as it was profound, Lord Acton warned that powerful people should not be let off the hook.
“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. […]
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. […]
“The inflexible integrity of the moral code is, to me, the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of History. If we may debase the currency for the sake of genius, or success, or rank, or reputation, we may debase it for the sake of a man's influence, of his religion, of his party, of the good cause which prospers by his credit and suffers by his disgrace.
“Then history ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide of the wanderer, the upholder of that moral standard which the powers of earth and religion itself tend constantly to depress. It serves where it ought to reign; and it serves the worst cause better than the purest.”
It is not 1887 anymore, but we still need those in power to be careful. Power still corrupts.
Lewis’ book about predictive statistics in baseball.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.