The Group Rewards Focus on Accuracy

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. That moved me, even if just a little bit at a time, toward my goal of getting closer to the objective truth. And that little bit had a huge long-run impact on my success.

When I started playing poker, “discussing hands” consisted mostly of my complaining about bad luck when I lost. My brother quickly got sick of my moaning. He laid down the law and said I was only allowed to ask him about hands that I had won. If I wanted him to engage with me, I had to identify some point in those hands where I might have made a mistake.

Talking about winning (even if we are identifying mistakes along the way to a win) is less painful than talking about losing, allowing new habits to be more easily trained. Identifying mistakes in hands I won reinforced the separation between outcomes and decision quality. These discussions also made me feel good about analyzing and questioning my decisions because of the approval I got from Howard and the players I looked up to. I used that approval as evidence that I understood the game and had promise as a player. When they complimented me for finding alternative approaches in my winning hands or understanding the contribution of luck, that felt terrific. In time, I could expand this approach to identifying learning opportunities in any hand I played, not just the winning ones.

In a group that regularly reinforces exploratory thought, the routine can become more habitual and easier to sustain independently. In a Pavlovian way, after enough approval from the group for doing the hard work of thinking in bets, we get the same good feeling from focusing on accuracy on our own. We internalize the group’s approval, and, as a matter of habit, we begin to do the kind of things that would earn it when we are away from the group (which is, after all, most of the time).