When Being Wrong is Right
There is currently a lot of finger pointing going on about who is right and who is wrong in responding to the COVID-19 epidemic. On July 12, 2020, the Trump administration circulated a list of statements to prove Dr. Anthony Fauci was “wrong” about the virus.
This is a clear example of Hindsight Bias – evaluating the correctness of a past statement or position based on a future outcome. The rationale being that if the outcome was bad, the initial decision had to be wrong.
Annie Duke explores this decision-making bias in depth in her best-selling book, Thinking in Bets. In this book, Ms. Duke explores a number of good decisions that turned out to have bad results. This includes Pete Carroll’s decision to pass in the closing seconds of Super Bowl XLIX (the Seahawks lost).
Ms. Duke’s wrote this book based on her experiences as a world-class poker player. The focus of the book is on improving your decision-making by understanding uncertainty. As she puts it: “Even the best decision doesn’t yield the best outcome every time.” In fact, in some cases, any decision will result in a bad outcome. Sometimes, all you can hope for is the least-bad outcome.
Understanding uncertainty is important for environmental and occupational health and safety professionals.
We are often asked to provide recommendations on protecting others from harm:
• Should employees be required to wear personal protective equipment?
• What personal protective equipment is needed?
• Should work be stopped because it is too dangerous?
• Should individuals be quarantined or isolated from others – if so, for how long?
Often, there are no easy or clear answers to these questions.
The situations in which environmental, safety and health professionals are asked to make a decision are often complex with competing interests, lack of information and unknown risks. Yet, a decision has to be made since even refusing to decide is itself a decision.
It can be difficult to embrace less-than-perfect answers.
For example, recommending wearing a bandanna as protection against COVID-19 is uncomfortable for most industrial hygienists. It runs counter to years of effort to persuade employees to wear the right protective equipment the right way. It feels like we are giving up on an important tenet of the profession.
Yet, in this case, the “wrong” answer, recommending the wearing of inadequate PPE, seems to lead to the “right” outcome – lower transmission of COVID-19.
Few things in life are all right or all wrong.
As Annie Duke says in her book, often we need to make the best decision we can from a set of unappealing choices where none of our choices are likely to turn out perfect. An unwanted result doesn’t make our decision wrong if we did our best to think about the alternatives and probabilities in advance.
All we can do is make the best decision we can at the time we need to make it.
Related Resources:
These are the links to the Washington Post articles on the White House criticism of Dr. Fauci:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/07/13/white-house-effort-undermine-fauci-is-criticized-by-public-health-experts-scientists-democrats/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/13/white-houses-maligning-anthony-fauci-annotated/
Check out Annie Duke’s book Thinking in Bets on Amazon.
For more information on Hindsight Bias, go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias.
Related to this topic is the communication of risk-based information to the public. Many industrial hygienists will remember Dr. Peter Sandman’s book, Responding to Community Outrage, and his many presentations at AIHA conferences. The book is no longer being sold by AIHA but it is available on-line. To access a wealth of information on this topic, go to Dr. Sandman’s website at :https://www.psandman.com/index-OM.htm
