We all love stories, but are they good for making decisions?

We have all read about the fellow who smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and died at 98, or the person who never believed in seat belts and was miracoulsy spared in an auto accident while his buckled-in companion sustained fatal injuries. But when it comes to decision-making, there is no doubt stories can mislead us. The funny thing is, our minds naturally favor stories and anecdotes over statistics.

In Thomas Kida's new book, Don't Believe Everthing That You Think, he talks about the six basic mistakes we make in our thinking. The first is we prefer stories to statistics. Our bias for stories is carefully manipulated by the media. In the book, Kida quotes Don Hewitt, the producer of "60 Minutes," as saying he would not accept a segment from Mike Wallace or Leslie Stahl or any of the other reporters unless it told a really good story.

To give you an idea of how powerful a good story can be, Kida quotes the following statistic: in July 1999, 11% of the people polled thought the lunar landing was a hoax. I remember in the third grade being ushered into the library to watch Walter Cronkite talk about this historic event, so it is very difficult for me to understand why anyone would think the lunar landing was a hoax. But to give you an idea of how powerful stories can be, the number of people believing we never did land on the moon doubled after televised a segment called "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on The Moon?"

We are not born with the ability to think critically - we need to train our minds to think this way.

On a recent fishing trip, my best fishing buddy caught this amazing fish, a 35lb blue catfish. Mike Ostrander, our guide, told us some riveting fishing stories and also gave us some useful statistics for evaulating our expectations on future trips. He told us a story about a time a few years ago when he put out four lines and immediately got a fish on each line that weighed over thirty pounds. Our guide also told us the Sunday before that there had been a fishing tournament with 30 boats. The first prize was won by a man who caught a 29lb fish.

What Abigail (my daughter, pictured to the right, who went on this fishing trip with me) and others should learn from this is that catching a 35lb fish is very rare. She should have fun fishing even if she only catches a few three pounders. But the memory of catching this humongous fish, and hearing the story of when the guide had hooked in four monsters at one time, influenced her thinking much more than the hard stats about the 30 boats that failed to catch a fish weighing over 30 pounds.

Decision-Making Best Practice #6: Beware of allowing annecdotes and stories influence your thinking. Get the facts and analyze the numbers.

Labels: facts, statistics, stories

I was at the Pony Pasture today and saw a bumper sticker that said, "Don't believe every thing that you think." This is great advice because everything that we believe is not true. What we think is largely determined by others. We are told thousands of things by our parents, teachers, advertisers, friends and politicians. Life is too short to independently verify every thing we hear. If we are told something enough times we tend to accept it as true. Many of the things we are told seep into our conscious and act to form the way we think.

Many of the false things that we think are harmless. If you believe a cup of coffee in the morning helps you think better, there is very little harm even if studies later prove this to be false. But sometimes we believe things to be true that are not true and it causes great damage.

About a year ago I found myself in a meeting with a psychologist who happened to believe in reincarnation. There were about thirty of us in the room and she said she was going to regress us and allow us to see some of our past lives.

I am not going to criticize her beliefs, but I am going to criticize her thinking.

You know, of course, that prior to the industrial revolution, the vast majority of people worked in agriculture. Also, a very large percentage of people who have lived before were Chinese since China has such a large population. So if past lives are uniformly distributed, you would expect that many of the people in the room would report that in their past lives they were Chinese peasant farmers.

No one reported that they had been Chinese in a prior life and only one person reported being a farmer. If we assume that just 20% of the people who lived prior lives were Chinese, than the chances that none of the people in the room had been Chinese in a prior life is .8 to the 30th power. That's almost zero. The occupations that people reported having in their prior lives were much more interesting than being farmers. There were ship's captains and General officers and princesses.

The psychologist who believed in reincarnation looked only for facts that supported her preconceived belief that she had in fact lived many times before. What she never did was look for ideas and evidence that people do not have multiple lives.

The point is, if you are making an important decision, it is often a very good idea to write out what are the facts and assumptions as well as what you believe and ask what are the things that you believe that may actually be not true.

Labels: facts