Welcome back to the Research Decode. Today’s research breakdown is about how time, skill level, and complexity of the problem influence decision-making and how many mistakes are made.
Assessing Human Error Against a Benchmark of Perfection
This study used chess as a setting to look at decision-making. Chess has been used previously to look at decision-making since it is easier than other settings to clearly determine if an error was made. If you play football, soccer, or volleyball, why should you care what a study about chess says? These insights about decision-making are broad and can be applied outside of chess.
The Study Design
The premise of the study is that there are three features when analyzing errors in decision-making: 1. The skill of the decision-maker; 2. The time available to make the decision; and 3. The inherent difficulty of the decision. How did they evaluate these three aspects in the study?
When looking at the skill of the decision-makers, this tends to be easier in chess than in other settings. Each player used in this study has a rating, called an Elo rating, which is based on their performance in the games they’ve played. Higher ratings indicate a stronger player. This allowed the researchers to evaluate which player should be favored in a game.
The researchers wanted to evaluate players given a consistent amount of time given to players. To this end, they only looked at games in which each player was allocated 3 minutes for the entire game.
Finally, to determine the difficulty of the situation the researchers determined the number of legal moves possible and how many of those moves are considered a blunder (labeled by the researchers as a move that puts the player in a losing position). The harder it is to avoid selecting a move classified as a blunder is considered a more difficult situation.
At any point in a game, the researchers were looking at the skill of the player, the amount of time they had remaining in the game, the board position and whether the selected move is a blunder. They analyzed over 25 million such instances.
Results
When looking at the results, one finding stands out. The researchers found that the difficulty of the board position was the greatest predictor of a blunder even when considering player skill and time available. When looking at time available or skill of the player, it was a coin-flip as to whether it would predict an error. However, the difficulty of the decision predicted an error in over three-fourths of the situations!
What does this all mean?
The easy answer is the more difficult the situation, the more likely it is for an individual to make a mistake. So how can we apply this? If you are a coach or player, take this information and put your players or yourself in situations that are easier to process.
Decreasing the complexity of a situation can help to minimize the risk of making a mistake, but this cuts the other way as well. We don’t want to just minimize mistakes, we also want to force opponents into making mistakes. We want to minimize the difficulty of the situation for ourselves while making it more difficult for our opponents. Keeping this in mind, let’s look at a quarterback as an example.
An example of a pass play with a single route.
A pass play with five routes. Which looks more complex?
The called play is a pass play with only one route. Without getting into the complexities of passing offense or defense, the player basically only has two options: to pass the ball or not to pass the ball. The quarterback only has to evaluate these two options. Now consider a pass play with five routes. The quarterback has more options to consider, meaning the possibility of making the wrong decision may be higher.
However, in a game, there is also the opponent to consider. Staying with the two-pass play examples from before, on the pass play with only one route, the defense only has one option to cover, which makes its job much easier. On the other hand, the pass play with five routes gives the defense more options to cover.
So which is the correct choice for the offense to select? The play with one option or the play with five options? That is where you need to analyze the difficulty for each side. Is the decision-making for the quarterback easy even having five routes? Then that might be the best choice since it makes it harder on the defense not to make an error.
Overall, you should be considering the difficulty of the situation for you and your opponent to maximize your performance. If you are interested in learning more and a better understanding of how to integrate this into your preparation, contact us. Working with us, we will get you performing and feeling your best.
Anderson, A., Kleinberg, J., & Mullainathan, S. Assessing human error against a benchmark of perfection. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2939672.2939803