Delay and Immunity

Nickolas Epley in his book Mindwise discusses how to encourage people not to lie. 

He notes a clever experiment by Daniel Gilbert (the author of Stumbling on Happiness ) that showed people were more willing to admit to having done something wrong in the face of evidence when confronted sometime after the event than when questioned immediately after the event.

Epley discusses the investigation into the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, the largest oil spill in history.  The rig workers said they feared reprisals for reporting safety concerns.  One worker said “the company was always using fear tactics”.  Apparently, not only would they kept quiet about their concerns, they would fake data in the company’s safety system.  Epley felt strongly that if the company’s executives had not threatened the workers' with reprisals if they reported safety concerns, the disaster could have been averted.

Epley also describes a University of Michigan hospital that began a medical-error-disclosure program.  The doctors were encouraged to “openly admit their medical mistakes in meetings with patients, explain what led to the mistake, and then offer fair compensation.”  This policy resulted in a reduction in malpractice lawsuits from 39 per year to 17 per year and reduced overall liability costs by 60%.

According to Epley, the problem was caused by requiring the patients to imagine what their doctors were thinking rather than allowing doctors to explain how a mistake happened, then encouraging doctors to share their experiences to ensure the same mistake doesn’t ever happen again in the future.

Know Thyself

I just finished reading the book Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want by Nickolas Epley. 

He suggests we conduct a simple experiment on ourselves.  He wants us to think of an important task we want to complete in the next few weeks.

Then write down on a piece of scratch paper our most accurate prediction of when (date and time) we are going to complete this task. 

Then write the best-case scenario if everything goes as quickly as possible.

Finally, estimate the worst-case scenario, if everything goes as badly as it possibly could.

Then he bets us that we will not make our worst-case scenario.

One case Epley describes is students working on their honours thesis.  The students’ predictions were on average 27 days in the best-case, 34 days in the realistic case and 49 in the worst-case.

The actual average turned out to be 55 days.

In another experiment, only 45% of the projects were done by the time they were predicted, with 99% certainty, to be completed.

Epley believes that the most interesting thing about the planning fallacy is that “despite having so much experience committing it ourselves, we so consistently think that our own mistakes are things of the past rather than the present.”