Let’s all become better listeners (Part 2): The first step in partisan detoxification

By Kent R. Kroeger (April 11, 2018)

{Send comments about this essay to: kkroeger@nuqum.com}

We are not born good decision-makers.

Our ability to analyze our environment, distilling its numerous variables down to those most critical to a valid causal model, and then employing that model to make good decisions is often poor.

More problematically, when our judgments are wrong, we tend to rationalize those mistakes as being the result of others’ errors or the result of being “mostly” correct but wrong in our timing.

As political psychologist Paul Tetlock observed, “Everything is obvious once you know the answer.”

Tetlock has spent over 20 years doing research on the fallibility of subject-matter experts. In one study, which took almost 20 years to complete, he determined the accuracy of 28,000 political and economic forecasts made by 284 experts and found that how an expert thinks matters more than what an expert thinks.

Conservatives are no better or worse than liberals at making forecasts. Optimists do not out perform pessimists. Years of experience in a subject-matter do not strongly correlate with accuracy. What does matter is judgment style…