The Trap of Resulting

Transcript

So if life contains hidden cards, why do we keep judging ourselves as if the final result reveals the whole truth? Duke has a name for this habit. She calls it resulting — the tendency to look at how something turned out and use that outcome as the primary measure of whether the decision behind it was good or bad. We look at the scoreboard and convince ourselves it tells us the quality of the thinking. It almost never does. The example Duke reaches for is Pete Carroll's call near the end of Super Bowl XLIX in February 2015. The Seattle Seahawks were on the one-yard line, trailing by four, with seconds left. Carroll chose to pass rather than hand the ball to running back Marshawn Lynch. The pass was intercepted. The Seahawks lost. And almost immediately, the verdict was in: worst play call in Super Bowl history. But Duke asks us to slow down and separate two things that got fused together the moment that interception happened. There is the outcome — the interception, the loss — and there is the decision, which was made before any of that was known. At the time Carroll called the play, the situational logic had a reasonable statistical case behind it. The Seahawks had limited timeouts. The defensive alignment they were facing made a pass worth considering. The play itself had been effective for them. The decision was not obviously reckless. It just ended badly. And that is the trap. Once the outcome is known, it colonizes our memory of the decision. Hindsight makes the bad ending feel inevitable. Self-serving bias runs in the other direction — when things go well, we credit our own brilliance, and when they go badly, we reach for bad luck or bad circumstances. Duke argues that both moves distort the feedback we get from experience, because they let us off the hook from examining the actual process. That is what makes resulting so costly. It is not just a minor cognitive quirk. Duke contends it creates a false feedback loop: we end up reinforcing bad processes that happened to get lucky, and we second-guess good processes that ran into bad luck. Over time, we are learning the wrong lessons from the right experiences. Now, outcomes are not worthless. Duke is not saying ignore results entirely. She is saying treat them as noisy evidence — one data point in a world where luck, timing, and hidden information all shape what happens. A tool you chose carefully can fail because of integration problems or a shift in the underlying data. A tool you picked carelessly can succeed because the timing happened to be right. The outcome tells you something, but it does not tell you everything, and it definitely does not tell you whether the thinking was sound. So if we cannot trust outcomes to grade our decisions, what can we trust? And how do we hold beliefs in a way that actually lets us learn — rather than just feel vindicated or humiliated by whatever happened to occur?