Duke: Truth-seeking groups rewire incentives by immediately rewarding mistake admission
Annie Duke · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · Jul 25, 2018 · at 33:32
Former professional poker player and author Annie Duke explains to Shane Parrish how high-accountability peer groups harness immediate social reinforcement to cultivate rigorous self-critique.
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“What happens is that when you set up that kind of group agreement and you really live it, the group is actually reinforcing those kinds of behaviors. So, you know, you can think about habit formation, right? It's that you need to have this reward, and the reward could be this short-term feeling of Okay, I just don't want to feel bad about myself that I was wrong. It's hard to have a reward that's in the long term. It's hard to say, well, my reward is that, you know, five years from now, I'll be such a better decision maker. And no, we want a reward now. Like, I don't think that we should try to short circuit that need for some sort of immediate gratification. It's just, what are you getting the gratification from? And if you set up a really good group, the gratification is, is from the group. They're giving you approval for that kind of thinking. So now, all of a sudden, being a really good credit giver gets people to, you know, reinforce you. Being a good mistake admitter, like, it gets people to reinforce you know, not telling bad beat stories.”
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