This blog comes from two things I have read recently. One
is a discussion on Big Think about trusting your common sense. The other is a paper on “The Hobgoblin of Consistency”
in the journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
The Big Think article looks at experts. Experts are good at something. And they know it. So they get pretty confident that their
instincts (which are just the application of well-learned rules) will lead them
to success. And it works so it makes
sense for them to do this. The problem arises
when they do something where they are not expert.
It could be that the world changed when they weren’t looking. This happens to technology experts all the
time, as we all saw when the real estate market turned around in 2007. The “rule” that real estate prices always go
up stopped working. At the company level
it is a major reason for the failure of Blackberry when companies changed to “Bring
your own device” policies.
Or it could be that they are in a new environment where
there are different rules. Apple did
pretty well shifting from Macs to iMacs to iPods to iPhones to iPads. But Sony couldn’t make the shift from TVs and
Walkmen (their early mobile phones weren’t bad, but they never made it to
smartphones). Motorola couldn’t shift
from feature phones to smart phones.
Or it could be that they have no business applying a
business rule to some other environment.
How many business execs try to “manage” their kids and spouses like
employees (and usually fail)?
So Maria
Konnikova at Big Think warns experts not to get too comfy in their
instincts, recognize that these are simply good domain-specific rules, and when
they switch domains they have to switch rules.
If they don’t know the rules of the new domain, then they shouldn't just try to
apply the old ones. They have to learn
all over again. This meta-awareness is
the sign of true expertise.
The Hobgoblins paper is similar but looks at poor performers. They look at something called the
Dunning-Kruger effect, which is the crazy phenomenon in which people who
perform badly somehow think they are doing well. We all think we are better than average
drivers but Dunning Kruger performers are really clueless.
The Hobgoblins paper discovers at least one reason why. It turns out that people who apply a simple
and logically rational rule on a consistent basis get very confident in their
performance. This makes sense except
when you realize how many simple and logically rational rules are totally
wrong. “The world is flat.” It is simple.
It is logically rational – after all the horizon extends pretty darn
far. Balls don’t keep rolling when we
put them down. But . . . wrong.
Unfortunately, this confidence leads to blindness towards
feedback. After all, why should you look
for feedback when you already know you are correct? So there were several kinds of people that
were identified in the study. Experts
who had a correct simple rational rule applied them blindly and did very
well. They were also very
confident. There were also poor
performers who had an incorrect simple rational rule, applied them blindly, and
did very poorly. They were also very
confident. Then there was a huge group
of people in the middle. Some performed
well and some performed poorly and some were in the middle. But what makes them similar is that they all
considered alternatives. Whether they
were consistently correct, consistently incorrect, or back and forth, just the
fact that they considered alternatives made them less confident.
For the poor performers, this allows them
to maybe learn and get better. The study
didn’t do the follow-up to see if they really did this, but at least it was
possible. They also could learn to avoid
the situations where they didn’t know what to do and defer to others
instead. But the blind, confident, poor
performers (can you say US Congress?) can’t.
