Pete Carroll was a victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. Poker players have a word for this: “resulting.” When I started playing poker, more experienced players warned me about the dangers of resulting, cautioning me to resist the temptation to change my strategy just because a few hands didn’t turn out well in the short run.
In most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing.
Chess, for all its strategic complexity, isn’t a great model for decision-making in life, where most of our decisions involve hidden information and a much greater influence of luck. This creates a challenge that doesn’t exist in chess: identifying the relative contributions of the decisions we make versus luck in how things turn out.
Those extra words don’t cost us much because it doesn’t come up very often—maybe never. But for people involved in specialized activities, it’s worth it to be able to communicate a complex concept in a single word that laypeople would need lengthy phrases to convey. Having a nuanced, precise vocabulary is what jargon is all about. It’s why carpenters have at least a dozen names for different kinds of nails, and in the field of neuro-oncology, there are more than 120 types of brain and central nervous system tumors.
We would be better served as communicators and decision-makers if we thought less about whether we are confident in our beliefs and more about how confident we are. Instead of thinking of confidence as all-or-nothing (“I’m confident” or “I’m not confident”), our expression of our confidence would then capture all the shades of grey in between.
Communism (data belong to the group), Universalism (apply uniform standards to claims and evidence, regardless of where they came from), Disinterestedness (vigilance against potential conflicts that can influence the group’s evaluation), and Organized Skepticism (discussion among the group to encourage engagement and dissent).
If you want to pick a role model for designing a group’s practical rules of engagement, you can’t do better than Merton. To start, he coined the phrase “role model,” along with “self-fulfilling prophecy,” “reference group,” “unintended consequences,” and “focus group.” He founded the science of sociology and was the first sociologist awarded the National Medal of Science.
