Disinterestedness

Disinterestedness: we all have a conflict of interest, and it’s contagious

Back in the 1960s, the scientific community was at odds about whether sugar or fat was the culprit in the increasing rates of heart disease. In 1967, three Harvard scientists conducted a comprehensive review of the research to date, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, that firmly pointed the finger at fat as the culprit. The paper was, not surprisingly, influential in the debate on diet and heart disease. After all, the NEJM is and was a prestigious publication and the researchers were, all three, from Harvard. The review helped shape a consequential debate about diet. Its influence makes the researchers’ undisclosed financial interest especially relevant, though that conflict alone does not establish the paper’s contribution to later obesity or diabetes rates.

An article published in JAMA Internal Medicine in September 2016 reported that a sugar-industry trade group had paid the three Harvard scientists to write the review. Consistent with the industry’s interests, the researchers attacked the methodology of studies finding a link between sugar and heart disease and defended studies finding no link. The scientists’ attacks on and defenses of the methodology of studies on fat and heart disease followed the same pro-sugar pattern.

The payment raises a conflict of interest regardless of whether the researchers consciously altered their conclusions. Disclosure would have allowed readers to consider that financial relationship when evaluating the review. At the time, the NEJM did not require such disclosures. (That policy changed in 1984.) Without disclosure, readers lacked information relevant to assessing possible bias.

We tend to think about conflicts of interest in the financial sense, like the researchers getting paid by the sugar industry. But conflicts of interest come in many flavors. Our brains have built-in conflicts of interest, interpreting the world around us to confirm our beliefs, to avoid having to admit ignorance or error, to take credit for good results following our decisions, to find reasons bad results following our decisions were due to factors outside our control, to compare well with our peers, and to live in a world where the way things turn out makes sense. We are not naturally disinterested. We don’t process information independent of the way we wish the world to be.

Imagine the headlines if Pete Carroll’s pass call had won the 2015 Super Bowl. They might have praised his brilliance, even though the information available when he made the decision would have been the same. Judging a decision by its outcome is what Duke calls resulting.

Richard Feynman recognized that in physics—a branch of science that most of us consider as objective as 2 + 2 = 4—there is still demonstrable outcome bias. He found that if those analyzing data knew, or could even just intuit, the hypothesis being tested, the analysis would be more likely to support the hypothesis being tested. The measurements might be objective, but slicing and dicing the data is vulnerable to bias, even unconsciously. According to Robert MacCoun and physics Nobel laureate Saul Perlmutter in a 2015 Nature article, outcome-blind analysis has spread to several areas of particle physics and cosmology, where it “is often considered the only way to trust many results.” The authors described this approach—introducing a random variable so analysts cannot infer the hoped-for outcome—as little known in biological, psychological, and social sciences at the time. They concluded these methods “might improve trust and integrity in many sciences, including those with high-stakes analyses that are easily plagued by bias.” Outcome blindness limits one route by which expectations can influence an analysis.

We can apply this idea of outcome blindness to the way we communicate information as we workshop decisions about our far more ambiguous pursuits—like describing a poker hand, or a family argument, or the results of a market test for a new product. If the group is going to help us make and evaluate decisions in an unbiased way, we don’t want to infect them in the way the data analysts were infected if they could surmise the hypothesis being tested. Telling someone how a story ends encourages them to be resulters, to interpret the details to fit that outcome. If I won a hand, it was more likely my group would assess my strategy as good. If I lost, the reverse would be true. Win a case at trial, the strategy is brilliant. Lose, and mistakes were made. We treat outcomes as good signals for decision quality, as if we were playing chess. Knowing the outcome can pull our assessment of the decision toward our assessment of the result.

Keeping the group blind to the outcome can help it assess the decision on the information available at the time. One way to do this is to examine decisions before the outcome is known. Attorneys can evaluate trial strategy before the verdict comes in. Sales teams can evaluate strategy before learning whether they’ve closed the sale. Traders can vet process prior to positions being established or prior to options expiring. After the outcome, make it a habit when seeking advice to give the details without revealing the outcome. In poker, it isn’t practical to analyze hands before knowing how they turn out since the results come within seconds of the decisions. To address this, many expert poker players often omit the outcome when seeking advice about their play.

This became such a natural habit that I didn’t realize, until I started conducting poker seminars for players newer to the game, that this was not the norm for everyone. When I used hands I had played as illustrations, I would describe the hand up to the decision point I was discussing and no further, leaving off how the hand ended. This was, after all, how I had been trained by my poker group. When we finished the discussion, it was jarring to watch a roomful of people look at me like I had left them teetering on the edge of a cliff.

“Wait! How did the hand turn out?”

I gave them the red pill: “It doesn’t matter.”

Of course, we don’t have to be describing a poker hand to use this strategy to promote disinterestedness. Anyone can provide the narrative only up to the point of the decision under consideration, leaving off the outcome so as not to infect their listeners with bias. And outcomes aren’t the only problem. Beliefs are also contagious. If our listeners know what we believe to be true, they will likely work pretty hard to justify our beliefs, often without even knowing they are doing it. They will develop an ideological conflict of interest created by our informing our listeners of our beliefs. So when trying to vet some piece of information, some fact or opinion, we would do well to shield our listeners from what our opinion is as we seek the group’s opinion.

Simply put, the group is less likely to succumb to ideological conflicts of interest when they don’t know what the interest is. That’s MacCoun and Perlmutter’s point.

Another way a group can de-bias members is to reward them for skill in debating opposing points of view and finding merit in opposing positions. When members of the group disagree, a debate may be of only marginal value because the people debating are biased toward confirming their position, often creating stalemate. If two people disagree, a referee can get them to each argue the other’s position with the goal of being the best debater. This acts to shift the interest to open-mindedness to the opposing opinion rather than confirmation of their original position. They can’t win the debate if they can’t forcefully and credibly argue the other side. The key is for the group to have a charter that rewards objective consideration of alternative hypotheses so that winning the debate feels better than supporting the pre-existing position. The group’s reinforcement ought to discourage us from creating a straw-man argument when we’re arguing against our beliefs, and encourage us to feel good about winning the debate. This is one of the reasons it’s good for a group to have at least three members, two to disagree and one to referee.

What I’ve generally found is that two people whose positions on an issue are far apart will move toward the middle after a debate or skilled explanation of the opposing position. Engaging in this type of exchange creates an understanding of and appreciation for other points of view much deeper and more powerful than just listening to the other perspective. Ultimately, it gives us a deeper understanding of our own position. This puts John Stuart Mill’s argument for examining opposing views into practice.