Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

by Annie Duke

In the study, two groups of subjects watched a video of police action halting a political demonstration. One group was told the protest occurred outside an abortion clinic, aimed at protesting legalized abortion. Another group was told it occurred at a college career-placement facility, where the military was conducting interviews and protestors were demonstrating against the then-existing ban on openly gay and lesbian soldiers. It was the same video, carefully edited to blur or avoid giving away the subject of the actual protest. Researchers, after gathering information about the worldviews of the subjects, asked them about facts and conclusions from what they saw. The results mirrored those found by Hastorf and Cantril nearly sixty years before: “Our subjects all viewed the same video. But what they saw—earnest voicing of dissent intended only to persuade, or physical intimidation calculated to interfere with the freedom of others—depended on the congruence of the protestors’ positions with the subjects’ own cultural values.” Whether it is a football game, a protest, or just about anything else, our pre-existing beliefs influence the way we experience the world. That those beliefs aren’t formed in a particularly orderly way leads to all sorts of mischief in our decision-making.