Truthseeking Charter

Not all groups are created equal

A well-chartered group can be particularly useful for habits that are difficult to break or change. This is not a crazy or even novel idea. We are all familiar with how the group approach can help with reshaping habits involving eating, consuming alcohol, and physical activity. The most well-known example of a productive group approach is Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).

The first of AA’s founders, Bill W., initially refrained from drinking through a difficult process that included years of failure, hopelessness, hospitalization, drugs, and a transformative religious experience. To maintain sobriety, however, he realized that he needed to talk to another alcoholic. Bill W. recruited Dr. Bob, the second founder of AA, on a trip to Akron, Ohio. Dr. Bob, considered by family and doctors to be a hopeless and incurable alcoholic, kept Bill W. from drinking on the trip. In turn, Bill W. eventually helped Dr. Bob give up drinking. AA has subsequently helped millions of people get and stay sober, and led to organizations trying the same approach with other difficult-to-tackle habits like narcotics abuse, smoking, unhealthy eating, and abusive relationships. That all sprang from the concept that we can do better with the help of others.

But, while a group can function to be better than the sum of the individuals, it doesn’t automatically turn out that way. Being in a group can improve our decision quality by exploring alternatives and recognizing where our thinking might be biased, but a group can also exacerbate our tendency to confirm what we already believe. Philip Tetlock and Jennifer Lerner distinguished two group reasoning styles in a 2002 paper: “Whereas confirmatory thought involves a one-sided attempt to rationalize a particular point of view, exploratory thought involves even-handed consideration of alternative points of view.” In other words, confirmatory thought amplifies bias, promoting and encouraging motivated reasoning because its main purpose is justification. Confirmatory thought promotes a love and celebration of one’s own beliefs, distorting how the group processes information and works through decisions, the result of which can be groupthink. Exploratory thought, on the other hand, encourages an open-minded and objective consideration of alternative hypotheses and a tolerance of dissent to combat bias. Exploratory thought helps the members of a group reason toward a more accurate representation of the world.

Without an explicit charter for exploratory thought and accountability to that charter, our tendency when we interact with others follows our individual tendency, which is toward confirmation. The expression “echo chamber” instantly conjures up the image of what results from our natural drift toward confirmatory thought. That was the chorus I heard among some groups of players during breaks of poker tournaments. When one player brought up how unlucky they had gotten, another would nod in assent as a prelude to telling their own hard-luck story, which, in turn, would be nodded at and assented to by the group.

Lerner and Tetlock offer insight into what should be included in the group agreement to avoid confirmatory thought and promote exploratory thought. “Complex and open-minded thought is most likely to be activated when decision makers learn prior to forming any opinions that they will be accountable to an audience (a) whose views are unknown, (b) who is interested in accuracy, (c) who is reasonably well-informed, and (d) who has a legitimate reason for inquiring into the reasons behind participants’ judgments/choices.” Their 2002 paper was one of several they coauthored supporting the conclusion that groups can improve the thinking of individual decision-makers when the individuals are accountable to a group whose interest is in accuracy.

In addition to accountability and an interest in accuracy, the charter should also encourage and celebrate a diversity of perspectives to challenge biased thinking by individual members. Jonathan Haidt, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is a leading expert in exploring group thought in politics. Haidt, in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, built on Tetlock’s work, connecting it with the need for diversity. “If you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth.”

In combination, the advice of these experts in group interaction adds up to a pretty good blueprint for a truthseeking charter:

1. A focus on accuracy (over confirmation), which includes rewarding truthseeking, objectivity, and open-mindedness within the group;
2. Accountability, for which members have advance notice; and
3. Openness to a diversity of ideas.

An agreement along these lines creates a common bond and shared fate among members, allowing the group to produce sound reasoning.

None of this should be surprising to anyone who recognizes the benefits of thinking in bets. We don’t win bets by being in love with our own ideas. We win bets by relentlessly striving to calibrate our beliefs and predictions about the future to more accurately represent the world. In the long run, the more objective person will win against the more biased person. In that way, betting is a form of accountability to accuracy. Calibration requires an open-minded consideration of diverse points of view and alternative hypotheses. Wrapping all that into your group’s charter makes a lot of sense.

The charter of the group must be communicated unambiguously, as Erik Seidel made clear to me. I had met Erik when I was a teenager, but when I started running into him at poker tournaments, it was the first time we were interacting in a business setting. Early on in my career, I saw Erik during a break in a tournament, and started moaning to him about my bad luck in losing a big hand. In three sentences, he laid out all the elements of a productive group charter. “I don’t want to hear it. I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, but if you have a question about a hand, you can ask me about strategy all day long. I just don’t think there’s much purpose in a poker story if the point is about something you had no control over, like bad luck.”

When you think about a charter for truthseeking interactions, Erik Seidel pretty much nailed it. He told me the rules of being in a pod with him. He discouraged me from confirmatory or biased thought like “I got unlucky.” He encouraged me to find things I might have control over and how to improve decisions about those. I knew he would hold me accountable to these things in future interactions. We would explore diverse ideas because he insisted that be the focus of our interactions.

Because I was lucky enough to be part of a group with a truthseeking charter, there was no question that my poker decision-making improved. When I could consult them on in-progress decisions, like whether to move up in stakes or bankroll management or game selection, their advice reduced the number of errors I was making. Likewise, access to their range of strategies and experiences improved the quality of my thinking and decisions on a continuing basis. When I had questions or didn’t understand why something happened, they would see things I didn’t. When they had questions or needed advice on a hand, I wasn’t just helping them work through a decision they made but would often get insights into my own game. Those interactions led to improvements in my game I would have overlooked or, at best, figured out on my own only after making a lot of costly errors.

Even better, interacting with similarly motivated people improves the ability to combat bias not just during direct interactions but when we are making and analyzing decisions on our own. The group gets into our head—in a good way—reshaping our decision habits.