28.2: Feedback- Learning from Experience

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Ironically, suboptimal reasoning is one obstacle to finding out how well we really do reason. We learn many of the things we do by trial and error: we often don’t get things right the first time, but frequently we can improve if we see what went wrong and try to adjust to do better. This only works, though, if we note the errors; without feedback telling us how accurate our reasoning has been, we can’t learn from our mistakes.

There are various reasons why it can be difficult to get good feedback about the quality of our reasoning, but the common pitfalls in reasoning we have encountered in earlier chapters are among the culprits. Here are three quick examples.

Hindsight Bias

Hindsight bias is the tendency to overestimate the likelihood that we would have predicted an outcome after we learn that it occurred (8.6). It impedes accurate feedback, because it confirms our view that we are right (“I knew what would happen”) more often than we really are. This makes it more difficult to correct our mistakes by learning from past errors, since we underestimate how often we are in error.

Confirmation Bias and Availability

Since most of us like to think we are reasonably accurate, we may notice and remember evidence showing our success, while ignoring evidence that suggests failures. This positive evidence will then be more available in memory, so we will be inclined to think that we have a better track record than we do.

Feedback can be Unpleasant

Feedback can be painful. Wishful thinking, various self-serving biases, and perhaps even defense mechanisms like denial can lead us to avoid feedback. After all, we may find out that we didn’t do as well as we had thought or hoped—maybe we didn’t do very well at all. Some teachers find their teaching evaluations so unpleasant that they don’t read them. They could probably learn things that would help improve their teaching (and lead to better evaluations). But they prefer not to know. Since these obstacles to getting good feedback involve flawed reasoning, we would get more accurate feedback if we did a better job of reasoning.